Elm Panels
Half our younger architects are in love with elm. What colour, what grain, and in the right place what hardness ! We have wasted the wood, and still waste it, more prodigally than the Western Australians wasted jarrah wood, which, like elm, is •slowly coming into its own. Jarrah has the markings of a serpent and the colours of a sunset ; is hard and yet amenable. It is obviously a luxury wood ; and yet for a
long while we paved London streets with it ; and I have seen it burnt as rubbish in Western Australia where land was being cleared for other purposes. In England we do not even burn our elms. We leave them to rot ; we endow them as hosts of the bark beetle, which carries the mould that may lie' the undoing of the live trees. Where the tree falls, there it- should certainly not lie. The experts of the forestry commission at Princes Risborough have made discoveries and inventions that should much increase the use of elm for internal decora- tion, especially for panelling. By a process of steaming they can entirely prevent the warping that is perhaps the chief objection to the use of the wood.
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