I heard some very sad news today and I found myself surprisingly quite emotional about it. Apparently (it was Breakfast News after all), one of the key features in the Southern Uplands, the Snow Gums, are in trouble. (You can tell we're in a different hemisphere, can't you? We have Southern Uplands and you have South Downs, both of which are elevatory land structures. (Hills and Mountains)
Anyway, (distracting thought over), I heard that the beautiful snow gums are dying, and they are dying because of a disease caused by beetles, and also global warming.
I originally come from North Gloucestershire, in the UK, and in my youth I used to play in the fields. These fields were bounded by hedges. They've worked out that a new plant variety grows in a hedge every hundred years, so if there are four or five main species of plant in a hedge, it's probably round about 450 years old.
Our hedges contained blackberry briars, dog rose hips, haws and elms. The elm trees stood out because they were two hundred years old and up to a hundred feet (33m) tall. They were magnificent trees. I used to wake up as a small child, and look across a couple of fields to a group of about ten of these giants.
From 1970 to 1974, I went to Bradford University, which entailed a lengthy 200Km long train journey. Coming south at the end of term, once we had passed Birmingham, heading south, we went through "my" country, the wooded country I knew and loved, where the hedges held the giant elms.
It was 1971 when the Dutch Elm disease reached Gloucestershire. I don't think it was particularly Dutch, but it was caused by beetles that turned these elms into Edam cheese. There was no cure. The affected trees had to be felled, and then all of the timber, every twig, had to be burned. You killed the beetle, but you burned the tree.
At that time, there was no "Global Warming", but the beetles were real enough. Every twelve weeks or so, as the train headed south from Birmingham, the country had changed. Gradually, the trees where I had played were fewer and fewer. After a couple of years, the land seemed flat. And empty.
I have never been to the Southern Alps. I have never seen a snow gum. But when I heard that it was a beetle-borne disease, I feared the worst. The elms, for all their magnificence, were only a fairly small part of the mixed ecosystem. The snowgums are in a virtual monoculture with its own small ecosystem. I don't know what has developed in Botanical Research over the last fifty years, but my guess is that the infestation is uncontained, and the wood will have to be burned. A couple of years ago, we had terrible wild fires, which pushed several species of plant and animal almost to extinction. This time, the disaster is in a small alpine ecosystem that exists in wild country. Sadly, how many animals and plants will survive the almost certain destruction and burning of the Snow Gums?
