== 4 of 4 ==
Date: Tues, Jul 8 2008 9:20 pm
From:

Today I drove a beautiful street in Fargo, ND that is lined with 100+ year old American Elms. It made the news here that they actually had to cut a few down due to Dutch Elm Disease!

I will post the chestnut pictures when I get back home. I wish that I could have gotten 4th of July pictures of the tree. The owner says that the flowers are so dense and bright that they are visible from across the bay on boat. The squirrels get any nuts too fast for people to get any. I measured the tree height with the standard ENTS laser-clinometer sine method. All the trees this close to the Lake Superior shoreline are of similar heights. It is only a few blocks from the lake.

The grove with the state champion tree was treated with the hypovirus with some initial success but the blight is still spreading there according to the last information that I have. I had heard that the stand was already rich in other native fungi that might somehow be slowing the spread of the blight in the grove. They are in an area where the prairie-forest tension zone intersects with a section of the driftless area (never glaciated.) All of this may come into play as an environment not quite ideal for the blight, but it survives degraded nonetheless.

Paul Jost