The Camperdown Elm: What Are We Doing to Nature?

For 10 years I’ve been wondering about this tree. For 10 years it’s creeped me out, and today is no different. You look at this tree and you wonder what in heck we’re doing to nature.

Turns out, somewhere around 1640, the earl of Camperdown, or somebody who worked for him, noticed a sport growing on the floor of the earl’s elm forest (note the irony). Of course the logical thing would be to figure out what it was and see what it did next, but why be a logical gardener? They dug the poor thing up and grafted it onto a Scotch elm tree and the rest is creepy mutant history.

Seriously.

This tree is a parasite. It only grows as a graft on that particular kind of elm. A Scotch elm. When it takes hold they cut the Scotch elm away (as in murder). The new tree is called a Camperdown Elm.

Got that? A perfectly good tree dies to make room for something—a mutant—that only humans can make. Not nature. Humans. It can’t reproduce itself.

This particular Camperdown Elm was planted in that spot in Port Gamble in 1875. I have no idea how long it’s supposed to live.

The question is, should it? How far do we go in altering nature? What would this ‘sport’ have become if Mr. Earl of Camperdown had let it be? If everybody who grafted one of these things had chosen to let the original tree live instead? Would the ‘sport’ have changed on its own? Would it exist at all?

I talked to this tree today. Yes, I talk with things. I was trying to withhold judgment, to not dislike the tree because of my perceptions of the perceptions of Mr. Earl back around 1640, and of all those people since then who think the whole mindset that would create a Camperdown Elm makes sense.

The response? The tree is angry and quite mad. As in, crazy, ferocious, insatiable. “Eat, eat, eat,” it said, over and over again. I backed away, taking my kids with me. We won’t visit it again.

This isn’t the first time humans have changed a plant at our whim, and not nature’s. Thank goodness, or I might not be eating marionberries this week.

Humans do this all the time, alter things to suit ourselves. It’s why our gene pools, from food crops, to animals, to our fellow humans, are so small, which is stupid and multiple topics for other days.

But, for today, when does our fascination with what we can do make sense and when is it just plain hubris?

I look at the insane Camperdown Elm (which also says it is dying, by the way, for anyone who cares to check), and I shudder.

How do we explain this to each other? To our children? To nature? How do we choose to live in, and with, the world?

The Camperdown Elm. A mutant tree that only exists by human intervention that requires murder.

Ick.

(c) 2011 Robyn M Fritz