Naturally Speaking
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Photo courtesy of Jerry Davis
This white oak has a very different gestalt compared to an American elm.
We come to recognize many plants, animals, even individuals by their general appearance. Lumping characters together in our minds, this general appearance often works quite well.
Gestalt is the term for these physical and biological configurations of many elements unified as a whole. If it looks like a duck or if it looks like an elm tree, chances are good that it is a duck, or an American elm.
Even with some of the characters removed, such as leaves on a deciduous elm or a dead elm, it still can look enough like an elm and help in identifying the tree as a dead elm tree.
Elms particular gestalt is a strong reason why American elms were abundantly planted as street tree across United States. In general they are vase-shaped, not pyramids or globes. Their bases are narrow and the branches fan out as the tree towers taller. Side limbs did not have to be pruned to allow traffic to flow through villages. That same shape appears in forest elms too, and can be recognized long after the tree is dead.
An open-grown bur oak has an entirely different gestalt.
