metromartin wrote:Its a shame about the elm trees as a I was suprised when I first saw a mature tree how large they can be as most only get to 15'
They are splendid trees. and were once a very common sight in most counties.
Martin, there's a superb Elm near the front entrance to Gloucester Royal Hospital in Great Western Road. How it has survived is a mystery. It has small dark leaves when I last looked at it ~ it's quite tall and mature ~ maybe 60+ feet and no sign of any die back on any branches or limbs.
Prior to the area being pedestrianised, Gloucester Cross had traffic flowing in all four directions. One sunny day, I spotted a female White Letter Hairstreak fluttering in the City Centre and it settled on the hot tarmac smack bang in the middle of the busy Cross roads with traffic passing in all four directions. Being centrally located, all the traffic passed it by.... and it survived to fly on.
Years ago, there were fine specimen Wych Elms in Gloucester Park and many others in surrounding areas. All since long gone but those saplings still shoot up and then die back when the bark is sufficiently mature to attract the beetles which carry the fungal spores I believe....
As a schoolboy back in the 1950s, I used to find the pupae on the lower branches of the Wych Elms ~ all those lower branches were at an ideal height to search, being just out of reach of browsing cattle .... any leaves or branches within reach soon got munched up so over the years, all those Wych Elms in the cattle fields took on a distinctive shape low down.
I have noticed that there are huge numbers of fine sapling Elms growing in some parts of the M5 Motorway embankments in the county. These are often allowed to grow to a good size before getting trimmed by the authorities or die back from the fungal attacks. These no doubt support some White Letter Hairstreaks ~ the butterfly has always been widespread in the county and I suspect it also uses Blackthorn for its eggs as I found and reared a specimen from an Oxford ovum found when searching for ova of the more regular Blackthorn Feeding Hairstreaks ...the Black and Brown. I reared a fine female from the single ovum ... it fed up on Blackthorn Flowers which appear before the leaves and move onto the leaves when they appeared.