Driving along this country road, John’s voice is a metronome: “That’s gone. That’s gone. And that one.”
From the passenger seat, I stare out at the blur of trees. A few are visibly affected by ash dieback, Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, the fungal disease that is an existential threat to the UK and Ireland’s native ash. What was once the litheness of a living tree acquires a stark angularity when it’s dead wood. However, many of these ash trees have retained a profusion of lacy foliage. Then I notice where the canopy has been punctured by the skeletal fingers of blunted twigs. Thin bracelets of leaves decorate the lower branches, but there are no terminal buds.
This is why it’s called “dieback”: the infection creeps from the outer foliage into the core of the tree; and all the while the contagion of wind-borne spores drifts inexorably across the fields.
John Maguire farms near the village of Ederney. I last visited this area in January, when nearby fields were smoky with the funeral pyres of ash trees as he tried to tackle what he calls “the plague”. He’d encouraged me to pick up a log that, judging by its girth, was a century in the making. I’d hesitated. Then I saw the telling black stains in the sapwood; the crumbling heartwood. The log was as light as papier-mache. Little wonder that John is worried about the roadside trees. A stiff breeze could fell them like skittles.
Since it was first identified in Northern Ireland in 2012, ash dieback has become endemic. Its impact is compounded by the caterpillars of a more recently arrived pest, the ash sawfly, Tomostethus nigritus, which can strip a canopy. Under this double assault, local hedgerows could be entirely denuded of their dominant tree species. My head is spinning at the thought. The ash has deep cultural roots. “The clash of the ash” describes the sound of the traditional Irish and Scottish games of hurling and shinty. It seems impossible that this graceful tree could simply vanish.
John pulls over. The same fields are now lush with summer. We admire their newly planted hedgerows. All native saplings: blackthorn; spindle; rowan; hazel; oak. A brave new world. With no ash.
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