On 15th February we teamed up with the Youth Action team from the South Downs National Park to plant some rather special Elm trees.

Dutch Elm Disease ravaged almost all of the English Elms in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Although Elms can still be found in the countryside, including on the Steyning Downland, these reach only about 15 feet high before succumbing to the disease.

Today very few mature Elms survive in England, outside the cordon sanitaire area of Brighton and Hove. Or that’s what everyone thought. But recently, several mature Elms were discovered growing wild in the Norfolk / Suffolk / Essex part of the UK and it is thought that these might be naturally resistant to the disease.

Cuttings of the surviving East England Elms were taken and successfully propagated by specialists from Wakehurst Place, Kew. Fourteen of them were then donated to the Steyning Downland Scheme as an experiment, to see if they can survive ‘in the wild’.

Normally this would be rather late in the year to be tree planting, but because the Elms were pot-grown, they should still do well. We skimmed off the turf for about 90cm around each tree, to reduce the competition from grass growth during the spring and added a tree guard to deter nibbling by rabbits!

The trees we planted were:

8 x Ulmus alta (from Boxted, West Suffolk)


3 x Ulmus serratula (from Pebmarsh, North Essex)


2 x Ulmus curvifolia (from Thorpe Abbots, Norfolk)

1 x Ulmus atrovirens (from Halstead, Essex)

Now all we need to do is wait and see if they grow into mature trees!