page_title: Ulmus minor subsp. minor
section_title: Cultivation
hierarchical_section_title: Ulmus minor subsp. minor / Cultivation
caption_attribution_description: English: Dutch Elm Disease strikes Badingham Looking down on Low Road from path out of the churchyard. Four great elms (+ an oak). The elm on the left was first struck 1984, and killed in a month or so. The other three held out for a couple of years. None left now.
context_page_description: Ulmus minor subsp. minor, the smooth-leaved elm, narrow-leaved elm or East Anglian elm, is a subspecies of the field elm native to southern Europe and Asia Minor including Iran.
  The name Ulmus minor subsp. minor was used by R. H. Richens for field elms that were not English elm, Cornish elm, Lock elm or Guernsey elm. Many publications, however, continue to use plain Ulmus minor for Richens's Ulmus minor subsp. minor. Indeed Dr Max Coleman of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh argued in his 2002 paper 'British Elms' that there was no clear distinction between species and subspecies.
context_section_description: Many mature specimens still survive in England, notably in East Anglia. The Woodland Trust currently lists (2013) some 120 surviving "ancient" smooth-leaved elms in England and Wales, some of which are among the elms now being cloned, propagated and planted as part of The Conservation Foundation's 'Great British Elm Experiment' and 'Ulmus londinium' projects, a scheme to identify disease-resistant strains and return elms to city and countryside.
  In a more academically-based project, most of the clones of the surviving European field elms that have been tested since the 1990s for innate resistance to Dutch elm disease by national research institutes in the EU, with a view to returning field elm to cultivation in Europe, would be classified by Richens’s system as Ulmus minor subsp. minor. Results from Spain (2013), for example, confirm that a very small number of surviving field elms (about 0.5% of those tested) appear to have comparatively high levels of tolerance of the disease, and it is hoped that a controlled crossing of the best of these will produce resistant Ulmus minor hybrids for cultivation.
  Narrow-leaved elm was occasionally planted as an ornamental urban tree.
caption: Four great East Anglian elms, Ulmus minor subsp. minor, tower over an oak (left) and a two-storey house, Badingham, Suffolk, 1984
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