The Ash (Fraxinus excelsior)

As a child in rural Hampshire my second “home” was an old Ash stool in a coppice of ash and hazel. My friends and I (just three of us) fitted inside the stool, we hung jam jars of flowers from the branches and ate jam sandwiches from greaseproof paper wrappings. She was our tree. If any tree deserves to be a she it is the Ash, indeed John Constable said, in a public lecture, of his favourite ash tree on Hampstead Heath “She died of a broken heart”. (A parish notice forbidding vagrancy had been nailed to her trunk the previous year)

Study of an Ash Tree in Winter, James Hey Davies, 1883, Manchester Art Gallery

Norse mythology says that the first person on earth came from the Ash tree, she is Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, and is also known as the Venus of the Woods. There are many reasons to venerate the ash, its delicately light green, compound leaves allow dappled light to reach the woodland floor, allowing primroses, bluebells, wood anemones, violets and other woodland flora to flourish where other tree species would shade them out. This in turn provides nectar for butterflies’ food for their caterpillars; an Ash woodland supports  colourful and complex food webs.

Poets and artists have lauded her: Edward Thomas said that the song of the ash grove was “soft as love uncrossed”, Wordsworth in The Prelude spoke of “The moon in splendour couched among the leaves of a tall ash that near our cottage stood” and Lady Celia Congreve in The Firewood Poem said “But Ash new or old is fit for a queen with crown of gold” The Latin name Fraxinus means firelight.

The Ash is easily recognised at any time of year, in winter its black velvet buds point up to the sky at the ends of gently curved branches. In spring and summer the leaves allow sunlight to filter through and in autumn bunches of seeds, “keys”, hang down. Leaves are shed while still green and decompose faster than those of other trees allowing spring flowers to bloom next year.

William Cobbett wrote more pragmatically in 1820 in Rural Rides “Laying aside this nonsense, however, of poets and painters, we have no tree of such various and extensive use as the ash….we could not well have a wagon, a cart, a coach or a wheel barrow, a plough, a harrow, a spade, an axe or a hammer, if we had no ash.”

Let us hope that the current research into resistance to Chalara fraxinea ( the fungus which causes ash die back) yields positive results so that we do not lose this most gracious of our native trees.

For more fascinating tales of Ash mythology see Trees for Life here.