Plant · P-919

Slippery Elm

Ulmus rubra

Slippery elm is a fast-growing native shade tree named for the mucilaginous, red inner bark that gives it a long medicinal reputation for soothing sore throats, coughs and irritated digestion. That same bark makes the tree a poor candidate for renewable harvest - stripping it from a standing trunk girdles and kills the tree, so it has to come from thinnings and prunings instead. It tolerates an unusually wide range of soil, including alkaline limestone ground that shuts out most other hardwoods, and it is one of the few trees that grows fine within a black walnut's root zone. Dutch elm disease and elm yellows are both fatal to it, but the tree sprouts readily from a cut stump or root crown, so it comes back even where individual trees are lost.