Elms

Carpentry: Elm wood was valued for its interlocking grain, and consequent resistance to splitting, with significant uses in wagon wheel hubs, chair seats and coffins. The often long, straight, trunks were favoured as a source of timber for keels in ship construction.

The density of the wood varies due to differences between species, but averages around 560 kg per cubic metre.

Elm is used primarily for its wood, which has great strength, durability, a tight-twisted grain and is resistant to rotting (when permanently wet). Uses include: boat building (keels, rudders and trawler boards) furniture, wheel hubs, wooden water pipes, floorboards, coffins and in decorative turning. In fact before metal was widely available many medieval English towns, including Bristol, Reading, Exeter, Southampton, Hull and Liverpool used hollowed trunks as water pipes. Some of these old water mains still survive and are occasionally dug up during building works. The foliage was also used for feeding and bedding domestic livestock. Elm was also used as piers in the construction of the original London Bridge. However this resistance to decay in water does not extend to ground contact.

Elms also have a long history of cultivation for fodder, with the leafy branches cut for livestock.

Elm bark, cut into strips and boiled, sustained much of the rural population of Norway during the great famine of 1812. The seeds are particularly nutritious, comprising 45% crude protein, and less than 7% fibre by dry mass.




Alders . Alder buckthorn . Ash . Beech . Birches . Box . Cherries, Plums, Blackthorn . Dogwood . Elder . Elms . Hazels . Hollies . Hornbeams . Junipers . Limes . Maples . Oaks . Pines . Poplars . Purging buckthorn . Rowans and Whitebeams . Service tree . Native shrubs . Willows . Yews .
posted by mediea
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