The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees - and the Fight to Save Them

A Guardian 'Book of the day'

For millennia,
elms shaped our landscape and our folklore;
then they started dying.

For the past century, a deadly pandemic has raged across the world, destroying all in its path and outmanoeuvring scientists' desperate attempts to halt it.

Dutch elm disease has killed hundreds of millions of trees globally and over 25 million in the UK alone, altering our landscapes forever. Few young people have seen a mature elm tree, yet they once covered great swathes of Europe and North America and their legacy lives on in our mythology.

The Lost Elms is a love letter to our vanished elms - the story of how we have nearly lost them all, and the long, slow fight back. It tells the gripping story of the scientists desperately trying to halt the disease's relentless progress, and demonstrates the deadly effect globalisation can have on the environment, the threat of climate change, the importance of biosecurity and the intricate ways in which trees are interlinked with other species. Woven throughout is a lyrical look at the elm's central place in our history, culture and folklore - the elm features heavily in Greek, Celtic, Japanese, Germanic and Scandinavian mythology; as the 'Liberty Tree' it played a symbolic role in both the American and French Revolutions; and since ancient times the elm has held associations with death and the supernatural.

However all is not lost: recent breakthroughs in ecological understanding reveal elms to be far more resilient than we ever imagined. This tree holds an important place in our history, and now might just offer hopeful lessons for how we can save other disappearing species and our environment.