Hello and thank you for downloading a witness from the BBC World Service.

I'm Louise Adalgo and today we go back to England in the mid 1970s

when a fungal infection known as Dutch elm disease led to the death of millions of Elm Trees, changing forever the British

countryside.

Changing forever the British countryside.

I've been talking to Dr John Gibbs, a tree pathologist who was at the center of the battle to try to save Britain's

elms.

One more dying Dutch elm disappears from the skylai.

This one was fell today in North London.

The virulent fungus, which is carried by a beetle the size of a house fly,

is spreading rapidly in weather similar to the hot-dry summers of its native habitat.

This year, nearly 2 million

elms are expected to die, dramatically changing the landscape where the beetles

make their devastating attacks. In all three quarters of England's 20 million entries would be destroyed between 1970 and 1975 in one of the worst natural disasters the English

countryside had ever suffered. It was described in one poem I remember as the rust of advancing elm disease.

You could look across the landscape and your right hand side the trees were still looking perfectly normal, dark green in

mid-summer and then from the left the trees going yellow, orange-y brown, all the foliage would

change first and then the foliage would fall and you'd be

left just with these gaunt leafless trees. Tree pathologist Dr.

John Gibbs was at the center of the fight to try to save the trees, but as he recalls, the spread of the disease was just too rapid.

Next year, the disease would have moved that bit further and there would have been a massive change to the appearance of another bit of the landscape

and then the filling process of course came along but in many areas the disease

...