Country diary: it’s still spring in the green underworld of the ash trees

‘Marmalade hoverflies flip upside down to harvest nectar from the maroon-coloured, bell-shaped blooms of water avens.’ Photograph: Carey Davies

When we walk into Bastow Wood, we abruptly step into another world. The wood sits high up on a bluff of craggy Great Scar limestone, surrounded by the sheep pastures that dominate most of the Yorkshire Dales, where the foundations of the landscape protrude from close-cropped fields in bare, bonelike scars. But inside the wood, these foundations have been softened by undergrowth. Piles of boulders are upholstered with velvety mats of moss, turning them into clusters of green marshmallows; banks of dog’s mercury sprawl across screes; tangles of hazel sprout from fissures in fragments of limestone pavement.

At this relatively high altitude (around 1,000 ft), it feels as though spring is still young. The canopy of the wood is airy and open, and a bright heatwave sun floods everything with the particular lemon-and-lime light of an ash woodland that has just come into leaf.

‘Piles of boulders are upholstered with velvety mats of moss, turning them into clusters of green marshmallows.’ Photograph: Carey Davies

In the verges next to the spindly path, wild strawberry, thyme and Welsh poppies flower amid a jumble of ferns and grasses. Marmalade hoverflies (Episyrphus balteatus) flip upside down to harvest nectar from the maroon-coloured, bell-shaped blooms of water avens (Geum rivale), and a spacious clearing is full of the dreamy blue spires of bugle flowers (Ajuga reptans). Hawthorn trees are still foaming with blossom. This could be said to be one of the most wild environments found in the Yorkshire Dales, but it has the feel of an artful, intricate garden.

There is a dissonant note under it all. I am not practised enough to tell if the sparse crowns of some of the ash trees are definitely caused by ash dieback, but I know that it is a symptom, and the disease is present in the local environment.

An ash tree with a sparse crown in Bastow Wood. Photograph: Carey Davies

The ground flora of limestone woodlands such as this is strongly shaped by the dominance of ash, which comes into leaf late and provides certain levels of light and shade as spring progresses. If – or rather, when – the ash disappears, many of the plants that enliven the understorey are likely to follow.

Other things will replace them, of course – but the unique way in which light, life and rock intertwine here will be lost, and spring will be diminished.