An American Elm in Carolina

On the lawn between Phillips and Peabody hall is a giant American Elm. This beautiful tree was most likely planted when the buildings where completed around 90 years ago, and it has dominated the landscape as long as I've been at Carolina. Students would climb it, teachers would hold class under it and people would sit on the stone wall eating their lunch in its shade. Besides the size of the tree, one of its most defining characteristics were the large burl knots that covered it.

Having walked past this tree almost daily for the past ten years I was stunned when our department got an email from the university arborist informing us that the tree was dying and had to be taken down. It had been infested by borers and while attempts had been made to quell the menace over the past few years the bugs had won.

I would be lying if I told you I had thought anything was wrong with the tree. Familiarity had made me blind to the signs of sickness the tree was showing this year. When I went out to look at it many of the top branches were bare and the leaves that remained looked pale and withered. Bees flew all around and crawled all over the tree. In my imagination vast networks of honeycomb lay underneath the bark. When I talked to the arborist the following week as the tree was being cut down I asked him if bees were responsible for the damage. It turns out they were more like fuzzy little hyenas nibbling on a corpse. The bore holes left by the real perpetrators would weep sap, and in the absence of many blooming flowers this late in the summer, the bees would harvest the sugar.

Of course with the tree going to be turned into mulch, I wasn't going to be any less of an opportunist than the bees. Remember those burl knots I mentioned? Burls are the giant nodule growths you see on the sides of trees and are formed at sites of various types of injury. This injury causes the grain to grow in an irregular pattern. Burls are prized for their unique figure and their rarity. And this tree was covered in them.

Since the tree was so distinct it has been featured in many pictures of the campus and in 2010 it was part of the "Noble Trees, Traveled Paths: The Carolina Landscape Since 1793" collection shown at Wilson Library. The burls were removed from the tree before it was to be cut down, with some of them sent to be exhibited in the library. The others were set aside and allowed to be claimed by interested parties.

While it is a shame that most of the tree will be reduced to mulch, at least some of it will be preserved. Matt and I are excited to make some beautiful pieces from this tree and plan on gifting some of our work to the department it stood by for 90 years. So come on back and see what we come up with.