By Staff
As I've mentioned, winter is my reading time and I'm of the opinion it's impossible to enjoy a book without a soul warming fire in the fireplace. The other night while reviving the fire, I picked up one piece of wood that immediately caught my attention. Whoa! This puppy's heavy. Without even looking I knew what it was – red elm.
I burn elm almost exclusively, partly because it comes pre-cured and is darn good firewood but mostly because the long, lanky limbs are just the right size without having to be split. I used to enjoy wielding a splitting mall, but here in my more seasoned years it fires up my shoulder tendonitis. This getting old business really sucks.
Anyway, I have a love affair with red elm. Though we have lots of elm snags around the house, none is the red variety. This red elm was a thoughtful gift from my son who brought some from our Marcellus farm where red elm abounds. It's a most amazing wood that has far better properties than it receives credit for.
I was first introduced to red elm by my father-in-law, an old school, salt-of-the-earth farmer. We were removing some fallen trees from the lane when we came across a red elm. "Toughest wood there is," he pointed out. "You can't split it to save your soul and burns like coal in the wood stove."
I've since burned chords of it and wholeheartedly agree with him. One year, I spent the entire deer season at our Marcellus cabin. The weather turned really sour. I'd been out all day and when I came in about as frozen as one can be the thermometer read 10 below zero and there was frost on the cabin walls. The kids had put up the firewood and it was all cherry, pretty lousy stuff in the heat department. No matter how full I stuffed the big barrel stove the cherry just wasn't getting the job done and two hours later I could still see my breath. I couldn't bail out because the half mile lane back to the cabin was snowed shut. Then I remembered a secret stash of red elm I'd hid under the cabin the year before for just such emergencies. In jig time the sides of the stove were glowing red and the cabin was toasty warm.
Red elm is more properly called slippery elm. As the nickname implies, the wood is a reddish color rather than cream white like all the other elms. Other common names for this tree are gray, soft, moose and Indian elm. I can't tell a standing red elm snag by sight. They say it has a different profile than the other elms, the limbs coming from the trunk at less angle, but I can't see it. Every red elm I've felled had the same long, upright limbs as the others. You know it's red elm when you hit it with a saw, though. The teeth can hardly bite into the wood and you have to muscle the blade in as the saw screams. I can't say why this is so for red elm is not all that hard. In fact, its hardness only ranks midway between poplar and cherry, both of which are considered fairly soft. Hard maple and oak are half again harder than red elm. Nor can I explain its unusually heavy weight, which one would think would relate to hardness (density).
Though not hard, red elm is extremely tough due to a unique, interlocking grain structure. It's next to impossible to split without a power splitter. The stringy wood fibers refuse to separate. In the old days it was prized for wagon wheel hubs and spokes and I suspect it would make the ultimate axe handle. One of my life's ambitions is to make a canoe paddle from it. Though heavy, I bet you could beat a moose to death without breaking it. The inner bark also has medicinal qualities for sore throat and digestive tract disorders. Deer know this and often strip the bark from young red elm trees. Today it's popular treatment for those that can't eat during chemotherapy. Carpe diem.