The tree doesn't look so special, what with its spindly trunk and saw-tooth leaves. Leaning in its enormous planter, next to four others priced between $140 and $230, the once-glorious species waits for someone to enter this suburban Home Depot and remember.
The American elm, a tree once so ubiquitous in the United States that it lined city streets from small-town Pennsylvania to Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue, is striving to make a comeback. More than 40 years after Dutch elm disease wiped out most of the country's stately trees, America's largest nursery retailer is stocking the saplings for people to buy and plant in their backyards.
It's a strange chapter in the life of a tree as American as Norman Rockwell and older than the U.S. Constitution. A hundred years ago, when elms made strong, 80-foot tall canopies over busy boulevards, nobody could have predicted that the trees would one day be competing with petunias and staple guns for the attention of busy customers.
But those who loved the elm are hoping its arrival at Home Depot - courtesy of a Georgia nursery owner who has cultivated a disease-resistant variety - marks a sort of homecoming.
"Where I grew up, in Tacoma Park, we had one at my house, and so did my father," said Gary Mangum, owner of Bell Nurseries, a Burtonsville distributor that has provided Home Depot with 1,000 elms to sell at its 93 area stores. "They were on all of the streets of Washington, and I remember seeing them all go away. The disease just killed more and more trees until, literally, none remained."
Some elms survived, particularly if they were isolated. Baltimore has a few along Gwynns Falls Parkway, on Keswick Avenue and in Druid Hill Park. New York's Central Park hung on to its elms, and many backyards here and there have an old tree.
Throughout history, elms have been prized for both their beauty and their hardiness. They could tolerate the belching pollution of industrializing cities as well as the searing heat of the country.
But once the elm bark beetle entered the United States in the 1920s, it introduced a fungus that basically starved the trees. Beginning in Ohio, the disease reached Maryland in the early 1930s. By the 1970s, it had spread throughout the country. About 100 million trees died.
Concerns about the effect of invasive species remain today. This winter, Maryland cut down more than 25,000 ash trees in Prince George's County to stop the spread of the emerald ash borer, a wood-boring insect that was illegally shipped here by a Michigan nurseryman in 2003.
