After the sound of gulls awakened the Sea-longing in Legolas, he said that, 'No peace shall I have again under beech or under elm.' (The Return of the King V 9, The Last Debate). This is slightly ambiguous, but it seems to imply that elms grew in his homeland, the Woodland Realm (we know from other sources that beeches grew there, but elms are not otherwise specifically mentioned).

The word elm is a very old one, and even in ancient Proto-Indo-European the tree was known as something like hélem. The origins of the name are therefore obscure, but some sources conjecture that that word derives from el, 'reddish brown'. An elm's leaves are green during spring and summer, so if this speculation is correct, it would presumably refer to the colour of the elm's wood rather than its leaves.