Ulmus rubraMuhl.

slippery elm

WFO wfo-0000416800 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Ulmus rubra, photographed by Eric Schmidt
fig. a Eric Schmidt, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-03-18 / obs. 183755470
Ulmus rubra, photographed by Pierre Cartier
fig. b Pierre Cartier, CC0 1.0 / obs. 162573167
Ulmus rubra, photographed by Robert Hoard
fig. c Robert Hoard, CC0 1.0 / obs. 197531621
Ulmus rubra, photographed by Jason Swanson
fig. d Jason Swanson, CC0 1.0 / obs. 140724129
Ulmus rubra, photographed by Cecil Smith
fig. e Cecil Smith, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 167346032
Ulmus rubra, photographed by Henry "Nick" Robertson
fig. f Henry "Nick" Robertson, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 137714345
Ulmus rubra, photographed by Tigran Tadevosyan
fig. g Tigran Tadevosyan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 143784174
Ulmus rubra, photographed by rboles
fig. h rboles, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 122635209

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 58 observations

Peak flowering in Mar, from 58 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 10 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Ulmus americana var. rubra (Muhl.) Aiton
  • Ulmus dimidiata Raf.
  • Ulmus fulva Michx.
  • Ulmus heyderi Späth
  • Ulmus pendula Willd.
  • Ulmus pinguis Raf.
  • Ulmus pubescens Walter
  • Ulmus rubra f. laevis F.Seym.
  • Ulmus tridens hort. ex Dippel
  • Ulmus triserrata hort. ex Dippel

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.