Ash to ashes

These are my closest ash trees, the ones I see when I look out of my bedroom window. One mature ash stands between and behind the pair of sweet chestnuts, and together with the ash saplings and seedlings they make a small copse that the tawny owl sometimes nests in, and always brings the fledgelings to for flying practice. In the light rain afternoon I went out and took some photographs of them. 

It’s windy today. Standing underneath looking up, the still-green leaves on the sapling danced beneath the limbs and ochre saw-toothed leaves of the sheltering sweet chestnut. On the parent ash, the leaves have long gone; they were one of the first to turn and fall, a brilliant, lime-tinted yellow while other species were still green. There are about half a dozen young ash in the undergrowth here. The one in the photo is about two years old; the tallest sapling is perhaps seven years old.

Some of reasons why I love ash:

• It was the first tree I learnt to identifying in winter; it’s the only common tree with black buds.
• If you clip a bud and carefully open and unpick it with a needle, you’ll find the leaflets already fully formed, on the tiniest scale. It’s all there, ready.
• It casts the most beautiful dappled shade. Herb flora has a chance under ash and speckled wood butterflies seem to love it for the same reason, fiercely defending the dancing beams of sunlight that it allows through.
• You can burn it fairly green, but if you have a chance to let it season it is the best firewood. Whatever the number of hours of work you’ve had to barter with the land-owner in order to get it, and the hours it’s taken to carry, saw, chop and stack it, a wood-store of ash is worth double.
• It’s graceful. Look at the three trees together: where the sweet chestnut arms stretch outwards, bending and twisting, the ash reaches skywards.

Tomorrow we start planting work. The seedling trees have arrived, four thousand plugs in bundles of twenty, carefully laid in a large crate and sent to us from a nursery in western Scotland, where the locally sourced seed has a similar genetic make-up to that in western Wales. No ash this year.

When I hear a government minister advising the public to wash their boots and their dogs’ paws after walking in woods, I want to weep. This is an island, we live on an island. There are twenty-one miles of seawater between mainland France and Dover, the best possible defence against an invading pathogen. This shouldn’t have happened.