We’re very fortunate in that our new garden backs onto woodland, and so as we look down from our veranda there’s a green wall on the other side of the flower beds, providing lots of hiding places for birds and squirrels. It’s quite a varied patchwork of green; there are many different species of tree here - oak, sycamore, rowan, wild cherry, crab apple, a good stand of laurel that ensures some green leaves all the year round, elder just waiting to come into flower, and, planted at our garden edge, pyrocanthus, rhododendron (beautifully in flower as I write this), various blossom trees and what looks to us like a climbing hydrangea.
But the trees I want to dwell on specifically are two that are a cause for concern: ash and elm. Since elm trees have more or less disappeared from much of the UK, thanks to the depredations of Dutch elm disease, I was delighted to see a mature specimen directly at the back of our garden. It has flowered and fruited well this year, and looks very healthy (see picture above). Has the dreaded disease simply not found it out yet, I wonder - or is it one of those fortunate trees that has a natural immunity to it? I hope for the latter. I hear that there’s a scheme under way to establish cuttings taken from disease-resistant elms in settings throughout the UK, n the hope that one day the elm can be once again be as familiar a sight as it is in, say, the paintings of John Constable. The young trees will be carefully monitored, and I hope the project meets with success.
There are several ash trees in our patch of woodland, and now we have ash die-back disease to contend with, a disease that has already been identified in Wales, where it seems usually to be associated with the import of young saplings. It astonishes me that we should have felt we needed to import saplings of a tree that reproduces so readily in this country that I must have pulled up over a hundred baby ash trees already since moving in here, growing in gravel paths, plant pots and even in one untended gutter. The answer, presumably, is all to do with money, and sometimes what seems to be cheap is in fact ruinously expensive.
There are indications that warnings were ignored from conservationists and foresters - though I suppose it’s easy to be wise after the event, and deciding which warnings, out of the many that cross the desks of environment ministers and their staff, should receive a prompt response can’t be easy. If there is any cause for hope it’s that ash reproduces so well and is a comparatively quick-growing young tree. Given a natural immunity within our ash stocks, they should recover in time, and perhaps, as with elms, a helping hand can be given. However, although dead trees have their own wildlife benefits (ask any woodpecker, if you can prise him away from the nut feeders in your garden), it would be sad to see the old standard ash trees bare and dead that are such a familiar feature of our field edges and the turnings in our lanes.
And you can’t help but wonder - what next, for the ancient and lovely trees of our green and pleasant land?
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