Elm disease is back

Friday 21st September 2007, 12:00AM BST.

SIXTY per cent of Jersey’s remaining elm trees could be killed off by disease this year.

Dutch elm disease, which devastated Jersey’s elm population two decades ago, is rife again, buoyed by an increase in the population of the beetles that spread it. A number of trees have had to be cut down this summer after contracting the disease, which wiped out almost all of Jersey 80,000 elm trees in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But States arborculturalist Nick Armstrong said that there would be no repeat of the campaign launched in the 1970s to save Jersey’s elms. He said that cutting down infected trees was costly and did little to prevent the spread of the disease. In any case, he added, there were few elm trees now left in the Island. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it. There is no money to do something like the 1970s campaign,’ he said.

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