The ash is one of Britain’s most recognisable and common trees. Tall and elegantly canopied, it is also one of its most beautiful, with its pale, feathered leaves and its fruits – its “ash keys” – hanging from its branches like real bunches of keys dangling from a caretaker’s belt. The late emergence of the leaves of ash trees allows species such as dog violet and mercury to thrive beneath them. Woodpeckers, owls and nuthatches nest in them. Lichens, moss and liverworts grow happily on them. Friendly fungi – such as the marvellously named King Alfred’s cakes – flourish upon them.
The National Trust reports that 30,000 ash trees on its land will have been felled this year owing to ash dieback. “Dieback” sounds like a gentle, seasonal withdrawal. In fact, ash dieback is a devastating disease caused by a fungus, Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, likely to have been carried into the UK on imported ash saplings in the early part of this century. A ban came on such imports in 2012 – too late to do much but slow the fungus’s spread. When affected by the gradually developing ailment, the leaves of the ash wither and blacken, and lesions develop on the branches; eventually the tree dies.
The skeletal, bleached remains of ashes, denuded of their glorious foliage, is already an all-too common sight. The Woodland Trust predicts that ash dieback will eventually kill 80% of ash trees. The scale of this is hard to comprehend: the government estimates there are 125m ash trees in woodlands alone in the UK. English landscapes such as the Mendips and the White Peak, now ash-dominated, will be drastically transformed. And losing ashes means not only losing trees but the habitat they provide.
The ash has an ineradicable place in European folklore. In Greek mythology, it was of ash felled from Mount Pelion that Achilles’s spear was made – the one he used to kill Hector in Homer’s Iliad. (Even now its hard timber is reckoned good for tough objects, such as hammers and walking sticks.)
In Norse myths, a great ash, Yggdrasil, grew at the heart of the world. The Norns – the ancient female deities that allotted the fate of humankind – dwelt among its roots; the gods held their courts among its branches. The 18th-century English naturalist Gilbert White reported a folk remedy for children with weak or ruptured limbs, perhaps a late survival from British pagan beliefs.
Climate change has helped the spread of arboreal diseases. A small percentage of ash trees appear to have immunity to the disease: it is here that hope lies for an eventual regeneration of the generously self-seeding ash, especially if the spread of the fungus is slowed as much as possible.
Meanwhile, it is time to pay attention to, and make the most of, the noble ash, and perhaps do as Wordsworth once did, when he watched the moon “couched among the leaves / Of a tall ash, that near our cottage stood / Had watched her with fixed eyes, while to and from / In the dark summit of the moving tree / She rocked with every impulse of the wind.”
