Twisty bendy elms

Same here. Standing dead elm 90% of the tree could go in the stacks to burn the same day. It may be tougher to split than other trees, but it burns great.

 

I'll go with the consensus and agree it's American elm. I still think it smells too good to be American elm, but maybe after smelling stinky cottonwood all week the elm doesn't smell half bad in comparison.

 

I just read that American elm and red elm can create hybrids in nature, and red elm also naturally crosses with Siberian elm. Furthermore, elms in general have the tendency to develop ecotypes, which are sort of like locally evolved sub-species based on local growing conditions. Not all trees do this, but apparently elms are especially prone to doing so. This could go some way to explaining why it can be hard to ID the different elms.

 

I forget which variety, but Eric Wanderweg says elm smells like hospital bandages and I agree.

 

That’s a fair point. The best way to identify them is by their leaves. I will say that it’s usually quite easy for me to tell the difference between Slippery, American, and Siberian. Also usually the American is standing dead from Dutch Elm Disease.

 

I think DED kills slippery, too, right? If not, something else has killed lots of mine.

DED is weird. Unlike the emerald ash borer, which attacked and killed every ash around here within a few years, DED doesn't wipe them all out at once. I've got a rather large and very healthy American elm in my front yard. Lots of the smaller elms have been killed, but there are still a lot of larger ones in my forest. I think DED has been active in this area for many decades, so although it's a big problem, it hasn't caused mass extinction.

 

I believe they hit the red elms also since I’ve cut up a few of those dead standing lately as well.

When I was a kid my dad and I used to get a lot of dead red and white and he said it was because of DED that they had died. And then it came through here again in the last 5 years and wiped out most of them. Occasionally there will be a green one producing leaves next to the road but the majority are dead again

 

Yes and sometimes Siberian elm as well. Though slippery and Siberian are less susceptible to it. The difference between DED and the ash borer is that DED is a fungus spread by elm bark beetles. The beetles themselves don’t kill the trees unlike with the emerald ash borer. Physiologically the elm bark beetle doesn’t move as well or as far as an ash borer can and their feeding doesn’t cause harm other than spreading the fungus. The fungus also spreads through root grafts under the ground which explains how stands of trees seemingly all die at once.

 

Thanks for the info on DED. Perhaps the root grafts thing explains why the one in my yard -- which is a good distance from any other elms -- is so healthy. I have noticed that in the decade that I have lived here, more American elms have died than slippery elm, and the small elms in the forest understory are mostly red elms.

Around here, the elms seem to die at such a pace that other trees in the forest are ready to fill in. So they provide me with some percentage of my annual firewood needs, but without leaving any bare spots in the forest.

Ash was a different story. Parts of my forest were 1/3 ash. So with EAB, not only did 1/3 of the trees in those areas die quickly, but once the big dead ash starting falling over (before I owned the property), they took down a lot of small and medium size trees with them, flattening out large areas of the forest. (There were some BIG ash, 36" diameter trunks and 80-90 feet tall). Those ash heavy parts of the forest are just now sort of filling back in, 20 years after EAB swept through SE Michigan. This has been a slow process since the forest has mostly black maple, hickory, red and white oak, and lesser numbers of many other hardwoods (elm, beech, cherry, basswood, hophornbeam). Lots of slow growers there, although red oak can grow at a moderate rate when conditions are good. Waiting for hickory to fill in the forest in a multi-generational affair.

 

Yep tree growth is a slow affair no matter how you look at it. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago as the old timers used to say.