There are many European elms, but Ruskin would have been most familiar with the Wych Elm ( Ulmus glabra) and the English elm ( Ulmus procera), which was probably the second commonest tree in the U.K. in the 1800s, with perhaps thirty million trees nationwide. Many of these would be the characteristic mature field edge trees popular in nineteenth century landscape painting, where they are often used iconographically to denote the interests of traditional rural societies or marginalised elements of the modernising agricultural economy. John Clare's poetry, in a similar way, often evoke elms as symbolic of the countryside being lost by the Enclosures Acts.
Ruskin follows the pattern of connoting elm as an essential element in an 'all English' arable landscape ( Works, 3.254; 7. 109; 11. 206; 35. 89), and contrasting this lowland, elm landscape to the sublime of the alpine 'passages of mighty splendour' ( Works, 3.287). Elm crop up as examples in drawing lessons and art criticism ( Works, 6.330; 13, 133, 145; 15. 71, 144; 20. 101) and are investigated in Ruskin's botanical work in Modern Painters V and Proserpina ( Works, 7.41, 416; 25. 239).