Despite the ravages of Dutch elm disease, these once ubiquitous features of our landscape still loom largeJust as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 did not originate in Spain, so Dutch elm disease is no fault of the Netherlands. It acquired the name thanks to the pioneering efforts of three Dutch scientists – Marie Beatrice Schol-Schwarz, Christine Buisman and Johanna Westerdijk – who identified the beetle-transported fungus that causes it in the 1920s. Nor is the so-called “English elm” (Ulmus minor) really English, inasmuch as it is thought to have been transferred here from Italy, so Reform UK party enthusiasts should probably agitate to repatriate all such specimens. More confidently thought native to these isles is the wych elm (from the Old English for “supple”) or Scots elm, which has long been thought to have healing and protective qualities. Our scholarly guide to this noble plant, Mandy Haggith, delves enthusiastically into such lore. The 17th-century English herbalist Nicholas Culpeper said that elm was connected to the planet Saturn and that its leaves could fix broken bones. Modern “healers” promise that drinking a decoction of elm bark can purge phlegm and stop diarrhoea. Haggith cites a present-day “Massachusetts-based herbalist and druid” who claims that slippery elm milk is good for insomnia. It would be unkind to call this sort of thing merely barking. The author insists that “a western scientific worldview” (in other words, a scientific worldview, shared by scientists in China and India) “is absolutely not the only way forests can be thought about”, which is fair enough. But the fake cures of the “wellness” industry are not without their own ecological downsides: as Haggith writes later, fashionable pseudo-remedies gone viral on TikTok or whatever can inspire the stripping of bark from healthy trees at injurious