Town & Country
ALMOST 30 million elm trees disappeared from the British landscape during the 1960s and 1970s with barely an acknowledgement. With 150 million ash trees facing a similar Armageddon from Chalara ash dieback, various groups are determined that Fraxinus excelsior will be culturally celebrated, and resistant species propagated, before the predicted demise of 90%–98% of them.
Last week, Dorset’s Springhead Trust held Ashscape, a six-day celebration, consisting of an art exhibition and an outdoor choral procession to a work composed by Karen Wimhurst, plus a conference. Speakers included the trust’s director Edward Parker, who said: ‘The ash has been known through history for its uses in farming, transport and medicine. While the loss of the elm was recorded only once, by Gerald Wilkinson in his book Epitaph
for the Elm, we hope that our event has helped to ensure that people start recognising the ash and the huge tragedy of its disappearance.’
During the conference, Tim Rowland, chief executive of Future Trees Trust, outlined the progress of the Defra-funded Living Ash Project, set up to breed trees resistant to ash dieback. ‘The selection of putatively tolerant trees for grafting is currently the main emphasis,’ he explained. ‘Evidence from Denmark, where the disease is more prevalent, indicates that approximately 1% of trees show good resistance, which is under strong genetic control. This would equate to 1.2 million potentially resistant trees in Britain.’
Staff from the Kent Downs AONB outlined details of The Ash Project, an Arts Council, Heritage Lottery and Kent County Council-funded arts and heritage scheme incorporating workshops, an online archive of memories and images, a conference (Imperial College London, March 26–27, 2018), an exhibition of contemporary artworks and objects to show ash usage through history (University of Kent, January 18 to mid April, 2018), plus a county-wide plan for tree regeneration. A landscape-scale sculpture that will be potentially sited in central Kent is in the development stage with Ackroyd & Harvey.
‘The ash is an unsung hero of the British countryside and the idea of The Ash Project is to generate a celebration, taking in its social and cultural history,’ says the project’s manager Madeleine Hodge.
In addition, the Springhead Trust launched its ash-mapping initiative at Ashscape; GPS co-ordinates from photographs taken on a single iphone can be used to pinpoint trees, initially within a 9sq km (31∕2sq mile) area in the Cranborne Chase AONB.
‘Ultimately, we’ll be able to restore the landscape to the recorded view,’ says Mr Parker, who, in addition to his work with the Springhead Trust, has been photographing and reporting on environmental issues around the world for more than 20 years; his latest book, Ash, will be published next year.
Another photographer, Archie Miles, plans to publish a 200-image monograph in May 2018: ‘We have to take a positive slant on what will be a disaster. I plan to leave a memorial to the ash to show people what we had.’