Word: elms
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...boyhood home had tremendous elms," recalls John Hansel, 45, a New Jersey manufacturer of watercoolers. "Those trees were my symbols of the past." In fact, Hansel bought his present house in Riverside, Conn., mainly because four venerable elms shaded the front yard. Unfortunately, two of the trees soon died, victims of the Dutch elm disease that now kills about 1,000,000 trees a year in the U.S. Distraught, Hansel launched a personal crusade to save the threatened species. In 1965, unimpressed by the botanists who believed that the American elm was doomed, Hansel set up Elms Unlimited, which...
Hansel was not the first to mount a scientific assault on elm disease. Experts have long known that it is caused by a fungus, carried by the elm-bark beetle, that clogs the tree's circulatory system. But ever since the disease hit the U.S. in the early 1930s, every cure has failed. DDT may kill birds as well as the beetles; another pesticide named Bidrin sometimes destroys the trees. Frantic elm owners have resorted to such quack remedies as turpentine injections or driving galvanized nails into the trunks (in hopes that the zinc oxide will deter the fungus...
Hardy Siberians. Now there is new hope for elm lovers. Funded with a $30,000 grant from Hansel's institute, Entomologist Dale Norris of the University of Wisconsin recently discovered a subtle chemical reaction that occurs when beetles attack elms. It is the quinol compounds in elm bark, he found, that make the tree delectable to beetles. Paradoxically, when the insects begin to munch, oxidation changes the tasty quinols into quinones that repel the beetles. By this time, unfortunately, the beetles have already infected the tree with deadly fungus. To ward off the beetles, Norris is now working...
...parallel attack on elm disease, the U.S. Department of Agriculture intends to cross the disease-prone American elm with the hardy Siberian variety. Even if the hybrid is a success, elm lovers are not likely to be pleased. The new tree clearly lacks the grace of its American parent. "It has a single, central trunk rather than our beautiful vaselike division," says Hansel. "Who will want a tree that looks more like a maple than an elm...
...telling exactly how he trains a sheep dog ("Once you have taught him stillness, you're getting somewhere"). An orchard foreman navigates his way through the niceties of pruning apple trees. A wheelwright remembers how he used to build wagons ("For making the hubs we always chose wych-elm") and paint them ("The blue rode well in the corn"). The village veterinarian, a sensitive man, contemplates the tortuous ethics of "factory farms," where pigs and chickens are raised assembly style. Wrinkling his brow over incipient inbred cannibalism, he observes darkly: "Tail biting among pigs is becoming a quite incredibly...