Guest column: Tom Bailey
Country Walking’s award-winning photographer pays his respects to Britain’s threatened ash trees...
CW’s photographer on Ash dieback.
LAST TUESDAY I was out just after dawn for a walk. While the sun wasn’t shining, there was enough brightness in the eastern, cloud-filled sky to silhouette the loose row of ash trees that peppered the nearby hedgerow. The trees had flushed (come into leaf) a few weeks earlier, but on four out of the five, dead branches were evident. A pair of carrion crows sitting sentinel on the nearest bare branches winged into the air as I approached. A twig fell from the tree, bent more than its brittle dryness could take. The sound was like bones snapping. This got me thinking, looking… Damn, it’s really happening; ash dieback is here. It’s in my backyard, changing the face of the little part of the world I know intimately, not some other part of the country where I know it’s been present for an ‘I’ve heard it all before and I’ve stopped paying it any attention’ period of time. My stomach tightened in that phone-call-in-themiddle-of-the-night kind of way.
Ash dieback is a fungus spread by airborne spores and it is going to change the face of the British countryside for decades to come. The most common variety is chalara or Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, and it is thought to have been imported into Europe from Asia by humankind, before romping westwards in near perfect breeding conditions – thriving particularly in damp air. Young trees are affected first. Leaves turn black in the summer and fall off. Splits appear in the trunks of affected limbs. Larger, older trees take longer to succumb to the effects, hence the name dieback. Whole limbs will be dead while the rest of the tree’s canopy appears to thrive. Year on year the tree grows weaker. Death is inevitable.
In the drier east of the country another form of dieback exists. Outwardly ash trees display similar symptoms, but root disturbance is thought to be one of the causes. Add to this the emerald ash borer beetle which can prove fatal to already weakened trees, and you realise the term ash dieback is best used collectively.
It’s the perfect storm for the humble ash. After all, who loves them? They go unnoticed, yet they selfseed easily and are one of our most widespread trees, with up to eighty million across the UK. Late to leaf and disappointing in autumn, what is there to like? Perhaps it’s the affable familiarity of it that will be missed once the numbers have crashed. Some experts claim that up to 95% could perish. Cutting down infected trees and trying to halt the spread would seem the logical thing to do. Yet the most beneficial way forward involves not removing stricken trees, but letting those with a natural immunity to the fungus live, ultimately to seed a new generation of resistant plants.
This summer I’m going to seek out the humble ash and pay it the respect it is due by revelling in its prevalence, beauty and historical importance. Once coppiced and pollarded, its harvested branches would be turned into all manner of everyday items. The ash has been our friend for many years. After all, Yggdrasil – the tree of life from Norse mythology – was an ash. How pertinent in this day and age for this, the tree of trees, to be at risk. It’s almost like it’s a last desperate warning to us not to mess it all up.