Epitaph for the Ash: In Search of Recovery and Renewal - Lisa Samson

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but it is only as an adult that I have learned to regard them as friends. They’re good company and they do talk if you stop to listen.

      I was too young to understand the full impact of Dutch Elm Disease, but as I grew up and my own interest in trees deepened, I often referred to Gerald’s books. His death in a car crash in 1988 fuelled my intention to learn more about his obsession with them. Now, nearly three decades later, it is predicted that Chalara fraxinea, the fungus that causes Hymenoscyphus fraxineus or Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus – Ash Dieback – will ravage the ash trees, again changing Britain’s landscape. It was found in the wild in Britain in 2012, in Ashwellthorpe, Norfolk, and since then it has spread relatively quickly, with new cases reported often in the press. My home county of Yorkshire will seem barren without the ancient ashes protruding from limestone scars and chalky cliff faces, or spreading their fine canopies over the hedgerows.

      The ash’s status as a ‘magic’ tree with healing properties gives it a fascinating history. Gerald suggests that in Neolithic times ‘the Ash may have been sacred’. Druids regard it as such, and in Norse mythology the ash was the Tree of Life, the most important living thing besides humans. It is one of our strongest trees, used for framework in vehicles and tool handles, but craftspeople and manufacturers are already using other materials.

      Across the length and breadth of Britain place names are associated with the ash – Ash, Ashburton, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Ashbourne, Ash-cum-Ridley, Ashover, Ashwater, Ashtead, Ashkirk, Ashcot, Ashwell – anthropological mnemonics linking people to their places. Some will have been named after self-sown ash seeds that blew on the wind, others for the ash their inhabitants cultivated, but all bear testimony to the part the ash has played in our civilization.

       The Blight of Ashwellthorpe

      My first view of Ashwellthorpe is of a bright yellow rape field where poppies blush under a louring sky, June, 2013. The wood comes into view, ‘a darker green than usual’, like the Enchanted Wood of Enid Blyton’s books. It is dense with many species of tree. In rich full leaf, they nod and sway in the dull light, waiting for the rain. They beckon to me over the hedgerows and houses, but the road running straight through the village leads me past. I nearly hit the kerb as I try to glimpse the ashes I’ve come all this way to see. An elderly cyclist ahead of me pauses to let me pass, perhaps to save himself or to stare at me, a stranger in this sleepy village. I pass the hall and the church, the rows of plain houses and cottages that line the road: a barrier obstructing my view of the wood.

      The village sweeps by and I pull up in the lane beside three ashes that all have the characteristic antlers of leafless upper branches, like oak trees widening their canopy as they mature. Crown dieback is a symptom of Chalara fraxinea’s presence and these trees remind me of photos I’ve seen of diseased trees in Poland. It could be part of a natural process … or signs of Ash Dieback. Naturally, I go for the latter theory since I know it has spread widely across the Norfolk Broads.

      I climb out of my car and look back at the village and the wood. It is low-lying, cradled in the embrace of the fields and village that have depended on it for centuries. There is a gap between a larger and smaller patch of woodland, mown through as straight as a Roman road. The smaller wood is Upper Wood and the larger is Lower Wood. They are believed to have been separated during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, when a perfectly straight line of vision was required between London and the Norfolk coast for semaphore messages to be relayed as part of an early-warning system. Apparently it took only half an hour to relay the message of an approaching ship near Great Yarmouth all the way to London. Upper Wood is now privately owned and is a jealously guarded pheasant-shoot, but Lower Wood is managed by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust and is a site of designated specific interest. It is also the first place in Britain where symptoms of Ash Dieback were discovered in the wild.

      The woods are beckoning to me. I fancy I can hear them whispering their secrets, like the trees in The Magic Faraway Tree. Blyton’s enchanted tree is huge and guarded by fairy folk, its branches reaching into different magical worlds. Its roots stretch far into the earth and it represents a complete entity, both admired and feared by the woodland folk who live nearby. Although the Faraway Tree is of an unspecified type, Blyton was perhaps aware of the ash’s magical properties and its powers of protection. It bears some resemblance to Yggdrasil, a huge tree that was at the centre of the Norse universe. Its roots were so abundant and so long that they reached into the underworld, and its trunk was so tall that its branches stretched to Heaven. Yggdrasil was the giver of life, at the beginning of all creation.

      I drag myself back into my car and drive on to Norwich, knowing I will return in the late afternoon. Being among green things, in nature, is almost as essential to me as breathing: I cannot go too long without it. I need to feel the air, sun and rain on my face, to hear the wind blowing through the trees and grass. With a pang, I watch the woods receding from view and just refrain from stopping the car to go back.

      It’s pouring with rain when I turn into the tiny Rosemary Meadow car park in the late afternoon. Steve Collin, head forester with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, has to flag me down. No bigger than a garden, it backs onto the Wildlife Trust Meadow that skirts the south side of the wood. It is bright with Greater Spearwort, like large buttercups, and tightly clustered Red Clover, but today the grasses hang their heads, beaten down by the rain, which has been gathering force all afternoon. Steve seems not to notice it as he squelches towards the wood, with me slithering behind. He is at home here and strides with an air of propriety, accustomed to leading people round the wood that has received so much media attention in recent months.

      The dripping trees enfold us in their shadows, sheltering us from the worst of the downpour. Fat raindrops splay on my glasses and blur my vision as I look up to the top of the canopy to see the tall ashes that have shot above the roof of the wood in their eagerness to reach the light. At my level, five feet four from the ground, it would be easy to walk past the trunks of the young ash without noticing what they are, since their bark is darkened with damp. They sway in the gloom of the wet wood, their leaves rustling, sweeping away the rain.

      Twigs snap underfoot as branches of alder and ash brush our legs and reach out to touch our shoulders. A short way into the woods, we stop by what is probably the most photographed tree of 2012: the ash sapling on which Steve first noticed signs of disease in October that year. It has a diamond-shaped lesion close to a shoot some way up its thin trunk, which is seeping resin, like congealed blood from an open wound. Unlike human flesh, though, the tree bark cannot heal. Steve breaks off a dead shoot to show me how brittle it is. The effects of Chalara are easier to spot on a thin young tree because the diseased girdle that forms around the trunk is visible and everything above it dies. Leaves have blackened and twigs have wilted, ready to fall to the ground, no use to anyone. Most of the dead leaves and wood are removed once they’ve fallen, as instructed by the Forestry Commission.

      On the day they first spotted the disease, Steve Collin and Dr Anne Edwards, the volunteer warden at Ashwellthorpe Woods, were looking at the coppicing that had been done. After twenty years, they had finally brought the cycle of coppicing into a regular rotation and the woods were responding to their care, with an annual increase in the numbers of bluebells and wild orchids that would not thrive as well without the light exposed by coppicing. Steve and Anne noticed that some of the trees appeared to be dead and reported it to the Forestry Commission, suspecting an invasion of Chalara fraxinea. Meanwhile Anne, a scientist, took samples back to the John Innes Centre where she works and alerted her colleagues to the potential danger lurking in their own backyard. Within weeks Chalara was confirmed but they knew they wouldn’t be able to gauge the real level of damage until the autumn leaves had fallen and the new buds had unfurled on the trees in spring. We discuss whether the fungus was blown in spores across the sea from Denmark, and Steve notes that the wind has been blowing easterly for a few years. In addition, the heavy rains in recent summers made perfect breeding ground for the fungus, although the ashes themselves can thrive in wet conditions.

      An area of saplings holds yellowed shoots that have been drained of life. A bright yellow one is still sprouting from the base, though

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