Its natural range is predominantly south European, extending to Asia Minor and Iran; its northern outposts are the Baltic islands of Öland and Gotland,[2] although it may have been introduced by humans.

The tree's typical habitat is low-lying forest along the main rivers, growing in association with oak and ash, where it tolerates summer floods as well as droughts.

[5] As for British varieties, "the continental populations most closely related [to eastern English Field Elm] are in central Europe", while south-western forms were introduced from France.

[6] He concluded, however, that owing to incomplete field-research at the time of writing, it was "not possible to present an overall breakdown of the European Field Elm into regional varieties".

However, Melville,[9] writing ten years later, identified five distinct species (including U. glabra in the count), several varieties and numerous complex hybrids.

Clive Stace (1997) wrote of the British elms "The two-species (glabra and minor) concept of Richens is not sufficiently discriminating to be of taxonomic value".

[11][12] In 2009 Dr Max Coleman of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh wrote: "The advent of DNA fingerprinting has shed considerable light on the question.

A number of studies have now shown that the distinctive forms Melville elevated to species and Richens lumped together as field elm are single clones, all genetically identical, which have been propagated by vegetative means such as cuttings or root suckers.

[17] The species readily produces suckers from roots and stumps, even after devastation by Dutch elm disease; consequently genetic resources are not considered endangered.

[18] The species has a hugely variable reaction to Dutch elm disease (DED), including all the fashionable pre-20th century plantsman's clones (see Subspecies and varieties).

[19] In 2013 researchers at the Universidad Politėcnica de Madrid announced the discovery and cloning of trees in Spain with levels of resistance greater than 'Sapporo Autumn Gold'[20] (see Cultivation).

[19] Results from Spain (2013), for example, confirm that a very small number of surviving field elms (about 0.5% of those tested) appear to have comparatively high levels of tolerance of the disease, and it is hoped that a controlled crossing of the best of these will produce resistant Ulmus minor hybrids for cultivation.

[27] The tallest recorded field elms in Greece were two specimens planted in 1650 beside the newly built church of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, in Omali Voiou (Oμαλή Bοΐου) near Siatista, which, despite being open-grown trees, attained a height of 40 metres by the mid-20th century.

[28] The immemorial elm opposite the village square of Aidona in Thessaly, Greece[29][30] which has been "listed" as a national "Monument of Nature",[31] lost its crown in a recent storm (2009) and has now been pollarded; it is regenerating vigorously.

[35][36][37] In France, a tree reputedly over 650 years old survived in the centre of Biscarrosse south of Bordeaux until the summer of 2010, when it finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease.

'L'olmo di Mergozzo', like its French counterparts 'l'orme de Biscarosse' and 'l’orme de Bettange', is hollowed out by age, its life prolonged by lopping, while in Spain the elm in the Plaza del Olmo ("Elm square" in Spanish) in Navajas, Valencia, is 6.3 metres in girth; planted in 1636 it features on the town crest.

italica, 'Mediterranean Elm' (1913), distinguished by its 14 to 18 pairs of leaf-veins,[51] was accepted, despite the wide source-area claimed for it ("Italy, Spain, Portugal and Algeria"), as U. carpinifolia var.

suberosa (Moench) Rehder - the so-called 'Cork-barked elm', korkulme (Germany) or wiąz korkowa (Poland), as a genetically random, maritime or juvenile form of U. minor, insufficiently differentiated to merit varietal status, its name a relic of taxonomic conservatism.

U. minor hybridises naturally with U. glabra, producing elms of the Ulmus × hollandica group, from which there have arisen a number of cultivars: The tree has featured strongly in artificial hybridization experiments in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States.