Teacher; Slippery Elm part 2

In my earlier post I wrote about the healing qualities of slippery elm bark, but as a teacher slippery elm has lessons to teach.  It is an ambassador to the plant world for many new herbalists.  It "speaks" in a language that, if observant, even the biggest newbie can hear.  Slippery elm is a tree that talks about hard times and good times, all one has to do is listen.

Many trees, such as nut trees, maple trees, or elm trees have what are called 'mast years'.  These are years where every nut tree in the forest will drop literally tons of nuts or elm and maples will produce thousands of seeds.  Other years they will produce few or even no nuts or seeds. 

There is a very good reason for this.  These seeds are predated on by many animals.  Trees like oaks feed many different animal with their acorns, wild turkeys, squirrels, deer, humans, even coyote and fox will eat acorns.  But the oak tree doesn't drop those acorns to feed animals.  They are trying to create a new generation of oak trees.  Basically those acorns are their babies.  If oak trees produced the same amount of acorns every year, the predators of those acorns would keep the same population every year and consume all of the acorns.  So what the oak, and many other trees do is have several years where they drop little or no seeds.  Oaks keep the population of acorn predators down, then, one year every oak tree in the forest will drop tons of acorns, so many that the limited number of acorn predators can not consume them all.  This way the oak tree knows they will create a new generation that year.  

Slippery elm trees do this very same thing.  Most years the trees do not produce any seeds, then suddenly one year (and 2012 is the year here in Wisconsin) the branches are loaded with seeds.  The difference between nut trees and slippery elm is that scientists cannot tell why nut trees chose one year over another to drop all their nuts.  The slippery elm tree however chooses to produce seeds during stress years.  Often we humans can't tell what is stressing the elm until after the year is up (hind sight is 20/20) but when we study the elm we can see that the year following the mast year is stressful in one way or another.

So to those who observe the slippery elm, harvest from her, care for her, they can tell when nature is about to send a stressful year.  We, in our bumbling ways, may not be able to feel something coming, but the elm can.  Listening to her makes us wiser.  Just like none of us can know everything, no one species is so smart it doesn't have to listen to the other species around it.  

The slippery elms are really talking this year.  Their branches were coated with flowers and now they are heavy with fruit.  Something stressful is coming for the elms.  Are we listening or do we turn a blind eye?   I will not.  If the elm tells me something bad is coming, I listen...and get ready.  Slippery elm is too wise of a friend to do anything else.