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| Ash – a life-enhancing tree that won't give up easily | Ash – a life-enhancing tree that won't give up easily |
| (5 months later) | |
| The proximity of a busy road to such a glorious fragment of Domesday England is one of my only regrets about Wayland. I also wish this t1000-year-old wood were five times bigger. There is at least consolation in its ownership by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust and in its regime of wonderfully restrained untidiness. At times it feels as if there’s as much dead wood on the ground as there is canopy overhead. | The proximity of a busy road to such a glorious fragment of Domesday England is one of my only regrets about Wayland. I also wish this t1000-year-old wood were five times bigger. There is at least consolation in its ownership by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust and in its regime of wonderfully restrained untidiness. At times it feels as if there’s as much dead wood on the ground as there is canopy overhead. |
| The bluebell carpet is all succulent green and there are exquisite clusters of pale lemon laagered in the crinkle-leaved primrose patches. Yet this is still a wood locked in winter. The most magnificent and deadest-looking of all Wayland’s trees are the ash. The trunks are bone coloured and bone smooth and, while the hazels’ wands have bark that is smoother, they are festooned in swinging catkins and emblematic of a different season. | The bluebell carpet is all succulent green and there are exquisite clusters of pale lemon laagered in the crinkle-leaved primrose patches. Yet this is still a wood locked in winter. The most magnificent and deadest-looking of all Wayland’s trees are the ash. The trunks are bone coloured and bone smooth and, while the hazels’ wands have bark that is smoother, they are festooned in swinging catkins and emblematic of a different season. |
| Ash, meanwhile, is nothing but elephant-coloured skeleton and gnarled twig-ends, and, as the trees rise, the topmost branches tend to droop, giving to them a subtle air of melancholy. This is all appearance, however. Nothing in a wood is kinder and more life-enhancing than the ash trees’ six months of seasonal death. Light floods onto the woodland floor and, even in full leaf, ash canopies are seldom more than fretwork, so their ground flora is always rich and varied. | Ash, meanwhile, is nothing but elephant-coloured skeleton and gnarled twig-ends, and, as the trees rise, the topmost branches tend to droop, giving to them a subtle air of melancholy. This is all appearance, however. Nothing in a wood is kinder and more life-enhancing than the ash trees’ six months of seasonal death. Light floods onto the woodland floor and, even in full leaf, ash canopies are seldom more than fretwork, so their ground flora is always rich and varied. |
| The other thing I love about ash is its reluctance to give up life. My hero from this last visit was a 120-year-old tree that had succumbed to rot and gravity and, judging from the angle of fall, to a northerly gale. It had smashed everything – field maple, hazel – in its unavoidable collapse but, like one of those Indian deities encircled by many limbs, it was an awkward god to kill outright. In time, those elbows leaning in soil will probably re-root. Although the trunk may be horizontal, it is two metres off the ground, and although eight-tenths of the stump is severed, a little is not. Its new buds are all ready to break leaf again this spring. | The other thing I love about ash is its reluctance to give up life. My hero from this last visit was a 120-year-old tree that had succumbed to rot and gravity and, judging from the angle of fall, to a northerly gale. It had smashed everything – field maple, hazel – in its unavoidable collapse but, like one of those Indian deities encircled by many limbs, it was an awkward god to kill outright. In time, those elbows leaning in soil will probably re-root. Although the trunk may be horizontal, it is two metres off the ground, and although eight-tenths of the stump is severed, a little is not. Its new buds are all ready to break leaf again this spring. |
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