Neighbourhood meeting hears details on saving Wolseley’s elms

By Mike Maunder for the Wolseley Leaf

https://theleafnews.ca/2025/neighbourhood-meeting-hears-details-on-saving-wolseleys-elms/

May 16, 2025

The tree committee of Wolseley Residents’ Association held an Earth Day meeting explaining to about 120 residents how elm trees can be inoculated against Dutch Elm Disease.

The committee is launching a campaign, with flyers being delivered door-to-door in Wolseley, to try to raise $100,000 which would enable saving approx. 150 elms along Wolseley and Westminster, considered the gateway to the community.

“When the campaign is launched, please take a walk down either of these streets and appreciate the big, beautiful elms,” explained Pat McCarthy Briggs, chair of the tree committee. “Consider what life is like for us under the deep, beautiful shade these trees provide, and consider what it would be like without them.”

Arborists explained details of the process at the meeting. It’s pretty much guaranteed if the tree’s roots are a safe distance from any tree that has Dutch Elm Disease and is inoculated before it has any signs of the disease. The process is expensive ($600-$1,000 a tree, depending on size) and needs to be repeated every three years. 

Presenters explained the Legislature and the City of Morden have used the inoculation process for years to save their elms. Also presenting at the meeting were neighbours from Newman Street who successfully used the process to inoculate seven trees on their block last year.

One participant at the April 22 meeting was Lenore resident Valerie Regehr. Ten years ago, she noticed the loss of elms along Lenore, in the block between Wolseley and Westminster. “I was chair of our block committee banding trees against cankerworms,” she recalled. “Ten years ago, the red dots began appearing on the elms. I’d estimate that in that ten years, we’ve lost 30 out of the 40 elms that were on this block. Now only ten are left. It’s changed the whole environment of the street – from shady to intense heat.”

Her special elm on the boulevard in front of her house is the grandmother of all the elms on the block. She and neighbours have set up a bench and garden area around it. They’ve tied ribbons honouring Indigenous causes.

But, most important, ten years ago they investigated the inoculation process themselves and banded together as neighbours to save the grandmother elm and two other elms down the street. Inoculating the three trees cost $2,300, which neighbours contributed in 2019. They did so again in 2022. And, even though some neighbours have moved, Valerie will be contacting neighbours again this year to inoculate the trees for their three-year treatment.

She finds that neighbours are prepared to contribute what’s needed to preserve the few elms that remain. “The big old trees are like the guardians of the block,” she says. As well as shade, shelter for animals and birds, and their role as nature’s most advanced breathing machine (converting CO2 to Oxygen), in Wolseley at least, trees are the main aesthetic of the neighbourhood, increasing beauty, peace of mind, and property values.

Valerie Regehr is confident the residents of Lenore understand these values enough to contribute what’s needed to save the four elms remaining on their block of Lenore.

Pat McCarthy-Briggs hopes residents of Wolseley understand these values enough to contribute to the project which will save many of these old guardian trees – or see them gone forever.