Altogether more familiar is our vernacular term for them, which was long-established by the mid 16th century when the botanist William Turner explained it: fruits of Fraxinus excelsior are ‘Called in Inglishe ashe keyes because they hang in bunches after the manner of keyes’.
The technical term for it is samara, a word originally used by Roman authors such as Pliny and Columella for an elm’s fruit, which, like ash’s, consists of a seed enveloped in a papery wing. The stacking was supervised by a young architect who later turned poet and novelist: Thomas Hardy.Ī Protean tree, then, our native ash, but all its manifestations have features in common: gunmetal-grey bark buds as black as lamb’s hooves inflorescences that seem inconspicuous compared with those of other members of the olive family, such as lilac and jasmine, but which, seen close-up, possess the exquisite intricacy of a lichen or coral a lustrous plumage of pinnate leaves.įinally, there’s the fruit, flat, oblong and hanging in festoons all winter until ready to hitch a ride to new ground on the March winds. Its bole has steadily enlarged to embrace the many headstones that were stacked around it in the mid 1860s, when railway construction brought an end to this immemorial burial ground. Most of these are to be found in deep country, but London boasts one famous example, in the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church. Others among these strange ash sculptures are responses to obstacles – a boulder or a stone wall that the tree has surmounted and surrounded with molten-seeming wood tissue. As John Evelyn, quoting Horace, wrote in the 17th century: ‘Hydra-like, a ground-cut Ash – “By havock, wounds, and blows,/More lively and luxuriant grows”.’ Denizens of ancient wood pasture and the results of pollarding and coppicing, many such trees testify to ash timber’s erstwhile economic importance. Its remarkable powers of recovery produce living sculptures as glorious as they’re grotesque, with stems defiantly ascending from boles that are obese, knotty and sometimes hollow or pierced clean through.
If injured or obstructed, Fraxinus excelsior presents a very different picture.
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