Michael Harding: The story of the decline of the mighty ash

Once upon a time a bird passed a seed through its body and it fell to the ground, and got lodged in the soil and went to sleep. Then the following year a tiny whip of ash stretched itself towards the sunlight and looked about.

In the distance it could see it’s mother, a great billowing monument of green leaf over sixty feet high. “That’s my mother,” the tree said to a passing butterfly, and it was glad to be far enough away from her to enjoy the sun, although its mother for some reason was stretching its roots in the direction of the young sapling.

And so the years passed and the little tree grew big and children played beneath it, sometimes cutting off the young branches, and nipping the black buds, and peeling the skin to make arrows from the wet pale slippery sticks inside the bark.

ExpandAutoplay

Image 1 of 3

But the tree was not damaged because the pruning helped it grow and it was proud of all the good things that the ash trees of the forest had given to the world. The little tree could hear the wind singing its praises.

"The biggest tree in Ireland is the ash," the wind sang in the greenwood. "And the farmers can tell the time for sowing potatoes by glancing at our leaves."

When the farmers go to the public houses in Dowra after the Mart they handle ash plants as they sit and eat big dinners or they twirl the sticks in their hands as they lean at the bar to swallow their pints. I've seen snooker cues of ash, and long ago I used to row out to the islands in Lough Erne with oars made from ash. When I was a child I would walk home from the schoolyard each day with an ash twig in my hand, I thought that the little black bud at the tip was like the hoof of some magical animal.

The ash was a portal, a door into the other world. It was planted at the gate, at the end of the road, and close to the house, because to cross where the ash stood, meant you were crossing a boundary. Maybe going into another person’s land, or house, or territory. Maybe passing from the ordinary world to sacred space.

All these things were whispered in the wood by the ancient ash and so the little plant grew more sturdy and even more proud.

But then one day the little tree felt sick. She had lesions along the bark of her young branches, and the leaves didn’t spring up into life during the sunny days. Instead they became black and on the bark there was an ugly orange fungus.

And the little tree’s mother, who was standing majestic in the corner of the field raised her limbs to the sky and shook her branches and cried to the wind.

“My children are dying,” she cried. “All my young ones are going to die, and when I grow old they will break my bones, and chop me for firewood and there will be no more of us left. No sound like the sound of the ash will be heard ever again in windy nights.

“No oar like the ash oar will ever again break the surface of the lake. The rivers will forget us. And the people will tell no more stories about the magic of the ash in the druid’s hand, or it’s force for mingling the male and female energies in the Cosmos. And no one will see again its lovely black buds that children played with for thousands of years.”

When the little tree died it was taken away, and sometimes the mother ash still cries out in the wind. She cries for her children. I know because I often hear her.

Anyone can hear her; if you go down to the woods near the canal bank and listen to the trees.