The large American elm that stands along Applegate Street in front of the Philomath Community Library and was the first to be nominated for the city’s Heritage Tree program could be dying, a certified arborist who sits on the city’s Tree Board said during a Public Works Committee meeting last week.
Graham Seaders told the committee that the tree appears to be exhibiting signs of Dutch elm disease. The presence of the disease has not been confirmed but Seaders plans to take a sample to be tested.
“I’ve been watching it for the last year or so how some limbs that are flagging — the leaves are dying but not falling off the tree. And that is a warning sign of Dutch elm disease. It’s a really bad pathogen. We don’t have a lot of elm trees around here so we’re not familiar with it but it’s a big deal.”
“Flagging” is a term used to describe dead, discolored branches that stand out against healthy foliage and have the appearance of flags waving from the tree.
“If it does have Dutch elm, I don’t know how long the life expectancy of that tree is going to be,” said Garry Black, public works operations supervisor. “That’s a pretty prominent one here in town. Obviously, it would be really sad to lose that one.”
Seaders said there is no treatment for a tree already infected with Dutch elm disease.
“All of the pesticide applications are preventative,” he said. “What you can do if it’s minimally affecting a tree is you can prune out that portion five or six feet down below where that’s infected. But from what it looks like on this tree, it’s probably beyond what would be possible for that. So it’s not good news.”
Seaders, who operates Seaders Tree Care, added that if the issue with the tree is not Dutch elm disease, then it’s “probably not such a big deal.”
Seaders said that if Dutch elm disease is present, the elm will slowly die.
“One other consideration though is that pathogen is spread by an elm bark beetle, and so if you have a sick tree, it attracts that beetle and then it makes the population of that beetle grow because there’s a food source,” he said. “So if there are other elm trees in the area, sometimes the management (strategy) is to remove those trees completely so that it doesn’t create a food source.”
Seaders said there do not appear to be very many elm trees around Philomath, especially ones of such a significant size as the Heritage Tree in front of the library.
“So it might be OK even if it is Dutch elm disease to keep that tree … we might get another three, five years out of it,” he added. “If we’re willing to prune the dead material out and keep it from being a safety hazard, you might be able to retain it for a while. But we’ll have to talk about that once we know.”
Seaders volunteered to climb the tree and take samples at no charge.
“The way that you diagnose it is you have to get up there, cut some branches off and then shave the bark off and look at the tissue to see if there’s streaking there,” Seaders said. “If it looks a certain way, you might be able to positively identify it from that. If that’s not there, you can send those samples into OSU Extension and for $50 to $100, they can confirm that with a microscope.”
Black said the city had someone lined up to remove a branch several months ago for the tree to be tested but it didn’t happen.
“The tree’s not died back enough to really be a safety hazard at this point,” Seaders said. “We just need to make a decision probably in the next couple months for how to manage it.”
The tree was one of the first five trees that received the city’s Heritage Tree designation. The large elm was preserved during the library construction project in the early 1990s — an effort that featured significant contributions from volunteers.
Former Philomath City Councilor Catherine Biscoe, who nominated the elm, said at the time that a Heritage Tree designation would be appropriate “as it preserves and memorializes extraordinary efforts by the community to establish the community resources of the library, the police department and City Hall.”