Word: elme
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Graceful and majestic, their delicate, almond-shaped leaves framed against summer skies, elms once grew thickly in the forests of the eastern U.S. and served as shade trees along thousands of Main Streets. Then, in the early 1930s, disaster struck. A load of elm logs arrived from Europe infested with a parasitic fungus. First identified in 1919 by Dutch plant pathologists, the fungus, Ceratocystis ulmi, invades the elm's vascular system, clogging it and causing death. Beginning in the Cleveland and New York City areas, then in scores of other communities across the nation, American elms died...
...University of Wisconsin in Madison, scientists have resorted to cloning, hybridization and other techniques to develop many kinds of disease-resistant elm. But none look like Ulmus americana, and all proved unpopular. Says Plant Pathologist Eugene Smalley: "The resistance thing is the easy part. Getting a tree that nurseries will use, that's tough." Smalley's best hope: a rare hybrid called the Sapporo Autumn Gold elm, a cross of Japanese and Siberian elms. It resists the disease and, at least in its youth, resembles the American elm...
...best preventive medicine, other than prompt removal of infected trees, is constant vigilance, spraying and pruning. New York City has 33,000 American elms, one of the largest municipal collections in the East. Fewer than 1% died last year, largely because the elms are doused each spring with a chemical that discourages beetles from nesting, and park rangers and volunteers conduct "elm watches" to spot the disease (early signs: wilting, curling and yellowing leaves; thinning of the tree's crown; brown streaks under the bark). An aroused citizenry helps keep the pressure on city hall; last month elm lovers...
With its graceful elm trees, its ornate Victorian clubhouse sparkling white in the clear mountain air, there is no more beautiful spot in all of thoroughbred racing than the historic old track at Saratoga. The upstate New York spa was the favorite vacation home of 19th century millionaires who came to the village to take the waters for their health and race horses for their entertainment. More than a century after America's first organized race meetings were staged in Saratoga, the spa remains an oasis of calm, a place where gentlemen and their ladies come to place...
...where the government, trying to repeat Britain's "opium sedation" of the Chinese, paid Leary and Alpert and Kesey and all his pranksters to popularize LSD; where George Bush is nuts for considering nuclear war. It's an intense world. It feels good to stride back out into the Elm St. sun and talk with the elderly man whose sign reads "Iran Still Holds Our Hostages--Put Kennedy in the White House" sign...