Wood that it wouldn’t be so – Winnipeg Free Press

Opinion

There’s a block on Dominion Street, from Ellice Avenue to St. Matthews Avenue, where I inched my way home under the canopy of large elm trees and sighed with relief.

Two blocks up, Dominion from Sargent to Wellington, it is largely denuded, and a year ago there were five large elms – now there are only four, and two have to be felled – which provide little summer shade and no peace offer splashing rain. Sargent to Ellice? Not so many anymore.

So crossing Ellice was a relief. Walk under the elm trees that arch over the sidewalk and street and you will feel the temperature drop and the heat of the sun leave your skin. The noise could also be heard, the light wind moving the leaves, the patter of raindrops – the whole effect relaxed the day and the way home to a completely different place.

Well, suddenly that’s gone. Dutch elm disease has spread across the street, and this single block of Dominion has lost 24 trees at last count last year, 16 of them in the last two months or so. You can still take a look back in time on Google Street View today: the last Google Car ride through Dominion took place in July 2015.

The present is much harsher: the stumps are still bright, wet, yellow and unweathered wood, and the sap still pulses from the roots. The large device kills an entire elm tree, no matter the size, in less than an hour. The shredders roar briefly and we move on. The trees with orange dots marking their beetle infestation wait their turn, but not for long.

This block is now unabashedly exposed to the sun – the sky is bigger and the houses are smaller – and the light is much harsher and less forgiving than it used to be.

Well, that’s no longer the case. And I fear most of the elms in Winnipeg will follow suit.

You may have guessed that I have a thing for trees – I like their company. A grove of aspens or a cottonwood grove on the riverbank is always in order. Nestled beneath the sprawling low spruce tree that touches the tips of the branches, it looks like its own chapel. Even walking through the maze of dead branches that often forms the undergrowth of mature fir trees is uniquely soothing to me.

It makes this city a bit strange for me – and the province too. There are formal boulevard trees and small wild patches in various corners in the city, but not so many that one can get lost in the best types of disordered trees. And so much of the land outside the city is cleared and planted, with trees only in occasional swathes and along the V-shaped slopes of the banks down to creeks and creeks.

Further north, in the boreal region, things get confusing again.

Root oak is a new species to me, with its jagged, war-torn structure and spindly branches that resemble a haunted house. The sheer size of the well-rooted hardwoods is impressive – even though the mathematical equations of how few trees would have to be felled to create a real cordon of firewood often run through my head. Poplars, round and smooth and with the black inverted eyebrow marks where branches sprouted from the trunks when the trees were small – it’s like seeing another type of tree trying out a not-quite-successful disguise. But the wild maples look familiar to me, even if birch, alder scrub and softwoods are more familiar to me.

The thing is, for me the trees still live on in some way in every piece of wood I use, whether it’s placing finished stair treads or framing something, splitting firewood or sorting through my ongoing collection of wood scraps finding the perfect piece of kindling to get a job done. (I have a three-foot-long, one-inch piece of Douglas fir that I keep just to look at the symmetry of its grain. Yes, I’m weird.)

And that is the ongoing tragedy of Winnipeg’s elm trees. The wood from infected trees cannot even be used unless it is kiln dried to prevent reinfections.

I know the big infected trees need to go. I know they continue to be shot one by one, a dozen here and then a dozen a block away. It is now a rearguard action that has been lost wherever the disease has established itself.

While there may be individual sentinels who somehow escape the beetle-fungus combination that deprives the elms of water from within, they will be by far the minority. The mechanism is very simple: bark beetles migrate from an infected tree to a healthy tree and carry with them spores of a fungus that kills by traveling with water through the tree’s vascular system. The tree responds by forming plugs to stop the infection, but the process is too rapid and the adverse reaction contributes to killing the tree rather than limiting the damage.

And off with the beetles, on to the next tree and the next. And the next.

And Winnipeg’s urban forest may not return to forest status for another generation.

I won’t see it. But I watch the last one disappear.

Russell Wangersky is commentary editor at Free Press. He can be reached at [email protected]

Russell Wangersky
Perspective Editor

Russell Wangersky is Perspectives Editor for Winnipeg Free Pressand also writes editorials and columns. He worked at newspapers in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario and Saskatchewan before joining the paper Free press in 2023. A seven-time National Newspaper Award finalist for opinion writing, he has also authored eight books. Read more about Russell.

Russell leads the team that publishes editorials, opinion and analysis – part of it Free presshas had a tradition of producing reliable independent journalism since 1872. Read more about Free pressLearn more about the history and mandate of and how our newsroom works.

Our newsroom relies on a growing readership to fuel our journalism. If you are not a paying reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.

Our newsroom relies on our audience to fuel our journalism. Thank you for your support.