Ashes to ashes

SHE is our Queen of the Forest. Our Norse neighbors called her Yggdrasil – the Tree of Life. So great are her virtues, says Pliny, that no serpent will lie in her shade. In ancient Greece she was sacred to Poseidon, god of the sea and of storms. Who is she? She is Fuinseóg, Fraxinus excelsior, none other than the common ash.
It is now several weeks since those trees were felled. I remember them standing, of course, as a long line of sentinel beings, each with it's own character and it's own place, weaving land into skyline.
How long had they been there? A century or more. What could they tell? A hundred years of grazing cattle in the fields below, first strawberry roan shorthorns, then bulky friesian milkers, hardy, white-faced red Hereford beef stock and, more latterly, heavy continental Charolais. A thousand boats upon the lake beyond. Generation on generation of songbirds, of migratory wildfowl, of curlew and cuckoo. The corncrake likely rasped in their shade. Yellowhammer sang from low branches. Now ask your neighbor where yellowhammer is – he may not recall him at all, and now the very perch has gone.
I drive that road on a regular basis and mourn the trees laid as they are, with just broad stumps to mark their place. It had to be, I know. There was no other way. While roadside trees are too often seen as a liability, those diseased and dying need to be removed. As fast as they sicken above ground, so they do under. Roots cease to function and start to decay, and as they do, the hold a tree has becomes invisibly weakened. A mischievous wind will one day bring our chronicler down, with the loss of livestock or, worse, human life. It is better they are felled.
These are, or were, ash trees, and the curse that brought their premature end is Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, better known as Ash dieback. But where did this disease come from, and what can be learned from this whole unfortunate episode?
The year was 2012. Government forest policy had for some years been increasingly inclined toward the planting of native hardwood trees. To facilitate this admirable intention, vast numbers of seedling trees were being imported from tree nurseries on the continental mainland, as if we lacked the wherewithal to grow them ourselves.
As is invariably the way, intensive growing conditions led to outbreaks of disease. When this went unnoticed, diseased plants found their way first into the new native hardwood plantations, and from there spilled their load of toxic fungal spores into the established population of wild ash trees. Now far more is being spent on mitigation than could ever be spent on growing our own.
There was a time we had proper woodland, even forest. Oak has always been dominant in Irish woodland, at least through historian eyes. Yet ash grew amid the oak, and where at attained the height of forest trees it made a proper show of things. Where oak is dark and full, ash is light and airy. It is the last of our trees to put forth leaves in spring and the first to lose them in the early autumn.
Even midsummer ash allows enough light to permeate to create what William Condry called a 'luxurious riot of flowering plants and ferns' – a far cry from the dull sterility of our ubiquitous non-native softwood plantations.
At the moment our ash trees are in flower. As is the way of stressed plants, even diseased trees near death sport dense clusters of purple flowers. These are much loved by wood pigeons, which spend their spare time (between love calls, display flights and nest building) amid the otherwise bare branches of ash, devouring this floral feast.
Ash had long been the most common tree in the country. Being relatively fast growing and a producer of some of the best firewood to be found, an ash tree was always an asset. Indeed, under the Brehon Laws, ash was one of the Nobles of the Wood. Cutting one down would lead to a large fine. Now it is fine to cut down a large one. Few even blink at the loss.
What can be learned? Monocultures don't work, not in the nursery, neither in the field. The natural order is near disorder.
Not only are specimen trees affected, the unwisely chosen ash plantations are likewise being removed. With what shall we replant? We know diversity is key. Perhaps we have yet to learn that simple truth.

Michael Kingdon formerly wrote these columns under the pseudonym John Shelley. A naturalist and keen fisherman, he lives close to the shores of Lough Carra.