Ash

Overview

The ash tree is dying. Ash dieback — Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, a fungal pathogen from Asia — has already killed tens of millions of ash trees across Europe, and British woodland ecology is being remade in its absence in ways that will take decades to understand. The loss has a quality of mythology about it, because in Norse cosmology the entire world is an ash tree. Yggdrasil, the world-tree whose roots reach into the three realms and whose branches shelter all life, is an ash. Odin hung from it for nine days to gain wisdom. The first man, Ask, was made from ash wood by the gods. That the tree which held up the world is now dying across its entire range under a disease it has no resistance to is either pure coincidence or the kind of thing that makes you reconsider how literally the old stories should be taken.

Botanical Notes

A large, graceful, deciduous tree reaching 20–35 metres with compound leaves of 9–13 pairs of leaflets plus a terminal one, one of the last trees to come into leaf in spring and one of the first to shed in autumn. Black buds are distinctive in winter. Flowers appear before the leaves — small, purple, without petals. Seeds in papery-winged keys (samaras) that spin in clusters through autumn. Found in mixed deciduous woodland, hedgerows, and limestone pavement throughout Europe. The wood is extraordinarily flexible and tough — the traditional choice for tool handles, oars, hurleys, and — in the pre-industrial world — the wheel spokes, axle shafts, and frames of every vehicle that moved on land.

Lore & History

In Norse tradition the ash is Yggdrasil — the world-tree — and the first humans were Ask and Embla, ash and elm, given life by Odin. In Celtic Britain, ash was one of the three sacred trees (with oak and thorn) found growing together to mark a place of power. It was carried by fishermen as protection against drowning. Babies in some traditions were passed over ash wood fires as a protective rite; infants with hernia were passed through cleft ash saplings that were then bound up — as the tree healed, the child would heal. The ash key (seed) was used in divination; to find a double ash key — two seeds from one stalk — was exceptionally lucky. In the English Morris dancing tradition, ash staves are the proper weapon of the Fool who governs the dance.

Warnings