trees! - american elm

so.. i had a plan, or, well.. something i wanted to do..  i had wanted to learn what a lot more of the trees and plants in the area are this summer.  thing is.. this past month or so kinda sucked and i didnt do much of anything and well..  life ya know.  but that doesnt mean that i cant start now..  only thing is is that the seasons are starting to change, but that's ok.
last fall i discovered the yeg Tree Map which is pretty amazing!  it has pretty much ALL the trees on public land listed, which are a lot, and i have used it to explore and discover a whole lot of new things.  it is not the most complete and accurate thing in the world, for instance there are a lot of very different looking varieties of crabapple trees and it just lists them as crabapple, and some newer trees that are not on or things like that, but for the thousands of trees in the city it's pretty damn fantastic.

now..  in the area around where i live the most common tree by far is the american elm!  there are whole blocks with nothing but elms on them.  actually, i read an interesting fact.. that there are over 60 thousand elms in the city and it's the largest concentration of disease free elms in the world, i'm not sure if it's true or not, but maybe?

ugh.  i forgot to take a picture of the leaves, which is kinda the most important part..  but i want to post this, so i'll just have to edit it and add it later.  oops.

this is what the bark looks like..

it's actually a pretty lovely looking tree, they grow large and twist into interesting shapes and create a nice canopy over the street.

and ta-da!
that is the first tree.. the american elm.