The flowers are also protogynous, the female parts maturing before the male, thus reducing, but not eliminating, self-fertilization,[4] and emerge in early spring before the leaves.

The American elm is native to eastern North America, occurring from Nova Scotia west to Alberta and Montana, and south to Florida and central Texas.

[9] The species occurs naturally in an assortment of habitats, most notably rich bottomlands, floodplains, stream banks, and swampy ground, although it also often thrives on hillsides, uplands and other well-drained soils.

The species attains its greatest growth potential in the Northeastern US, while elms in the Deep South and Texas grow much smaller and have shorter lifespans, although conversely their survival rate in the latter regions is higher owing to the climate being less favorable to the spread of DED.

There is some reason to hope that these elms will preserve the genetic diversity of the original population, and that they eventually will hybridize with DED-resistant varieties that have been developed or that occur naturally.

In the 19th and early 20th century, American elm was a common street and park tree owing to its tolerance of urban conditions, rapid growth, and graceful form.

This however led to extreme overplanting of the species, especially to form living archways over streets, which ultimately produced an unhealthy monoculture of elms that had no resistance to disease and pests.

Elms do not naturally form pure stands and trees used in landscaping were grown from a handful of cultivars, causing extremely low genetic diversity.

[10] Ohio botanist William B. Werthner, discussing the contrast between open-grown and forest-grown American elms, noted that: "In the open, with an abundance of air and light, the main trunk divides into several leading branches which leave the trunk at a sharp angle and continue to grow upward, gradually diverging, dividing and subdividing into long, flexible branchlets whose ends, at last, float lightly in the air, giving the tree a round, somewhat flattened top of beautifully regular proportions and characteristically fine twiggery.

In 1926 the Klehm Nurseries of Arlington Heights, Illinois, wrote: "American Elms grown in the regular way from seedlings show extreme variability, growing up into trees of all shapes, some of them being very slow in growth while others are moderately rapid in development.

[24] The tree was propagated and marketed in the UK by the Hillier & Sons nursery, Winchester, Hampshire from 1945, with 450 sold in the period 1962 to 1977 when production ceased with the advent of the more virulent form of Dutch elm disease.

[31] The United States National Arboretum released 'Valley Forge' and 'New Harmony' in late 1995, after screening tests performed in 1992–1993 showed both had unusually high levels of resistance to DED.

The National Elm Trial provided no data on ‘Jefferson’ because an error in tree identification had occurred earlier in the nursery trade.

[39] In 1993, Mariam B. Sticklen and James L. Sherald reported the results of NPS-funded experiments conducted at Michigan State University in East Lansing that were designed to apply genetic engineering techniques to the development of DED-resistant strains of American elm trees.

[40] In 2007, AE Newhouse and F Schrodt of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse reported that young transgenic American elm trees had shown reduced DED symptoms and normal mycorrhizal colonization.

[45] The American elm's wood is coarse, hard, and tough, with interlacing, contorted fibers that make it difficult to split or chop, and cause it to warp after sawing.

[10] Later, with the advent of mechanical sawing, American elm wood was used for barrel staves, trunk-slats, and hoop-poles, and subsequently became fundamental to the manufacture of wooden automobile bodies, with the intricate fibers holding screws unusually well.

[10] Young twigs and branchlets of the American elm have tough, fibrous bark that has been used as a tying and binding material, even for rope swings for children, and also for making whips.

A large specimen, which stands on Summer Street in the Berkshire County town of Lanesborough, Massachusetts, has been kept alive by antifungal treatments.

The city of Winnipeg spends $3 million annually to aggressively combat the disease utilizing Dursban Turf[53] and the Dutch Trig vaccine,[54] losing 1,500–4,000 trees per year.

[55] The current Tree Register of the British Isles (TROBI) champion grows in Avondale Forest near Rathdrum, County Wicklow, Ireland.

[60] The tree, an American white elm, became a celebrated attraction, with its own plaque, a fence constructed around it and a road moved in order to help preserve it.

The city of Cambridge had plans for it to be "carefully cut up and a piece sent to each state of the country and to the District of Columbia and Alaska," according to The Harvard Crimson.

[68] The Parliament Hill Elm was planted in Ottawa, Canada, in the late 1910s or early 1920s when Centre Block was rebuilt following the Great fire of 1916.

[69] Despite protests from Ottawa area environmentalists and resistance from Opposition Members of Parliament the tree was removed in April 2019 to make way for new Centre Block renovations.

The trees are particularly noteworthy along the Mall and Literary Walk, where four lines of American elms stretch over the walkway forming a cathedral-like covering.

[71] While the stand is still vulnerable to DED, in the 1980s the Central Park Conservancy undertook aggressive countermeasures such as heavy pruning and removal of extensively diseased trees.

The NPS used a number of methods to control the epidemic, including sanitation, pruning, injecting trees with fungicide and replanting with DED-resistant cultivars.

The NPS combated the disease's local insect vector, the smaller European elm bark beetle (Scolytus multistriatus), by trapping and by spraying with insecticides.

[73] The nobility and arching grace of the American Elm in its heyday, on farms, in villages, in towns and on campuses, were celebrated in the books of photographs of Wallace Nutting (Massachusetts Beautiful, N.Y. 1923, and other volumes in the series) and of Samuel Chamberlain (The New England Image, New York, 1962).