Dear Readers, at this time of year you might have noticed the most distinctive and elegant  tree gently changing colour on the streets of London. Raywood Ash goes through wave after wave of colour as the leaves turn, from a purplish-brown through coral pink and gold.

But a few years ago, I was reading this book by Archie Miles, about native British trees. I am a little more  optimistic now about the future of ash than I was when I wrote the original piece – it seems that rather more ash trees have resistance to ash dieback than I originally thought, and so hopefully these graceful trees will continue to grace our streets and green spaces for many years to come. Let’s see what I wrote back in 2021.

Dear Readers, I am continuing to read through Archie Miles’ book on British trees and thought that today I’d look at the ash tree. It’s one of my favourites, with its elegant leaves and those buds like tiny hooves, and the fact that we are likely to lose most of the species because of ash dieback makes them even more precious.

You might remember that in an earlier post this week, I was hoping that the Australian Raywood ashes in the cemetery might have some resistance to the disease. Alas, it appears not to be so, so even these beauties might not be spared.

In the cemetery, the ashes pop up all over the place, and Miles suggests that the ash was the tree that colonised most quickly after the hurricane in 1987, and the impact of Dutch elm disease. It is a fast-growing tree, and historically known as the husbandman’s tree, used for agricultural implements and as fuel wood – it is said to burn well even when green. I love its delicacy (which gave rise to the name of ‘Venus of the Woods’) but its very short season (it is one of the last trees to come into leaf and one of the first to lose them) has made it unpopular in gardens, though I suspect that some of the fancier varieties might tickle a gardeners’ fancy.

Although some people think of ash trees as mundance, workaday trees they have a very surprising capacity to change their sex from one year to another. This is particularly confusing because ash trees can produce male, female or hemaphroditic flowers, either on separate trees or all on a single tree. Botanists don’t know why the tree can do this, but speculate that it might give an advantage when the climatic conditions for setting seed are ideal, or when there is a lot of competition. It might also be handy if a space suddenly opens up for colonisation – in this case the more seeds the better! It might well explain why ash is capable of popping up anywhere (I have one in my garden that I have to coppice every year before it takes over completely).

Ash trees flower once they’re thirty to forty years old. The flowers appear on last year’s growth before the leaves appear, but they can bloom anytime from late March to May, and Miles tells us that it’s believed that this allows the tree to compensate for damage to the earliest flowers from the late spring frosts. The male flowers appear first (as in the photo above), then the hermaphrodite flowers and then the female ones. Only the.female flowers will turn into the ash keys (known as samaras).

When you consider the long associations between ash and humans, it’s not surprising that there is a lot of folklore about the tree. Miles quotes a rhyme that young women said when they were hoping to find a sweetheart:

Even ash, even ash,
I pluck thee off the tree;
The first young man that I do meet
My lover he shall be.

The young woman was supposed to put the ash leaf in her left shoe and wait to see what happened.

Ash was also supposed to be protective against snake bites, and, if you did get bitten, it was said by Dioscorides, first-century Greek physician, to be ‘singularly good against the bitings of viper, adder or other venomous beast’. More usefully in our present day, when we are unlikely to be molested by serpents, Culpeper thought that an extract from the leaves would ‘abate the greatness of those who are too gross or fat‘.

Perhaps most fascinating, however, is the belief that ash could be used to cure a rupture in a child. Miles remarks that the Reverend Gilbert White, writing in 1776, described how parents of a child so afflicted would pass the infant through the trunk of an ash tree that had been split with an axe. The tree would then be bound up again, and once it healed, so would the child. The ritual was still being performed as late as 1902 in Devon.

What a beautiful and useful tree the ash is! A glimmer of hope on the preservation of the species in light of ash dieback is the Ash Archive, which consists of a collection of 3,000 ash trees planted in Hampshire. They comprise cuttings taken from ash dieback tolerant trees observed in the wild and grafted onto ash rootstocks. Their development will be monitored, in the hope that some will have a long-lasting resistance to the fungus that causes the disease. At some point in the future it might then be possible to plant these trees, or the seeds that come from them, back into the wild. Let’s hope that there is a future for this beautiful tree here in the UK.

You can buy Archie Miles Book ‘The Trees that Made Britain – An Evergreen History’ here.

Photo Credits

Photo One by Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two by By Pleple2000 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1564105

Photo Three by Willow, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons