The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees – and the Fight to Save Them
On sale
3rd July 2025
Price: £22
A Guardian ‘Book of the day’
‘Unofficial poet laureate of our woodlands.’ – THE SCOTSMAN
‘Not just an elegy to our lost elms but also a meditation on life, culture and trees.’ – FRED PEARCE
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.
‘Unofficial poet laureate of our woodlands.’ – THE SCOTSMAN
‘Not just an elegy to our lost elms but also a meditation on life, culture and trees.’ – FRED PEARCE
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.
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Reviews
Not just an elegy to our lost elms but also a meditation on life, culture and trees.
Unofficial poet laureate of our woodlands.
Haggith's captivating book is full of personal reflections and anecdotes. It is engagingly written and has important things to say about globalisation, the threat of climate change and the value of biosecurity.
This book defies us not to fall in love with elm trees, with the idea of elms and all that their loss and what remains represents to us.
Her enthusiasm is contagious. As someone who began this book with literally no idea what an elm looks like, I was inspired to download the Woodland Trust tree-ID app and resolve to pay more attention to our ligneous friends.