Epitaph for the Ash

On our approach to the solid cluster of houses that forms the hamlet of Fundenhall, the fields that scroll away from the woods, with the marks of previous inhabitants imprinted on the soil, are used to human feet. The early Anglo-Saxons, when they arrived from their cold wastelands, must have been seduced by the warm climate and fertile, waterlogged land. We are walking in an anti-clockwise direction: south-east to Fundenhall, north-east towards Toprow, north-west to Wreningham, then south towards Lower Wood. From every angle I can see the wood. It is the dominant landmark in the area, the nucleus around which everything else has grown – fields, hedges, paths, roads, farms and houses, people and animals. In a landscape where hills are absent, birds of prey perch on the highest trees (probably ash) to survey the surrounding countryside for voles and mice.

The wood is about a mile to the west as we walk by a high hedge at the side of another neat field of corn. By the end of this walk we will have seen it from south, east and north. Between us and the wood, hidden under layers of earth and crops, the Anglo-Saxon burial ground lies behind Ashwellthorpe Hall, invisible now among the tranquil expanse of fields. Another skylark is singing above us, and the scents of flowers are delicate and sweet. Yellow Field Pepperwort, red Sheep’s Sorrel and Elderflower waft across the golden waves of wheat. My excitement grows at the prospect of walking in the wood again. It is hot now, well past midday, as we cross the corn fields towards Lower Wood. Although I was in it less than twenty-four hours ago, I am eager to see it in sunlight.

A row of ash and alder guard the north side. They have been here longer than any other species. We are entering by a path where tall grasses have been trodden down and the sides of an earth mound have been sculpted by the weight of many feet. Lizzie is slightly ahead and pauses to look around. In black T-shirt and shorts, she is framed by an ivy-smothered trunk and a mature ash, almost hidden under the burgeoning mass of vegetation rising above her. She looks slighter than usual and, fleetingly, as she slips into the waiting wood, she seems like a tree wraith or a wood nymph.

An ancient bank, with a ditch, surrounds the wood on all but the west side, where Lower Wood was separated from Upper. The ditch, now rank with stagnant water, would have been deepened by farmers over the centuries to deter livestock from entering the woods, but the original bank is believed to have been created in the Anglo-Saxon period. The ditch would have been dug with ash-handled spades, labour-intensive work. The farmers and peasants who toiled over it are most likely under the soil in the burial ground I mentioned.

When the ash trees have all gone, the mound will be exposed. Nothing is ever planted in this wood. The ‘Ash’ in Ashwellthorpe will be a historic reference. The ‘well’, originally ‘weall’, meaning ‘bank or mound’ in Anglo-Saxon, will remain: a lip of mud sculpted over fifteen hundred years. It will continue to accommodate the rain and silt and keep the boundary of field and tree. If the bank could talk, it could tell us who made it and why, tales of the many people and animals who have passed over it and left. When the ash trees have gone, the bank will be the sole keeper of the woods.

The earthworks will do the job they were originally intended for: to delineate the woods from the farms and maybe as a form of defence. Perhaps they were decorated with spikes or sharp implements to impale robbers and marauders crossing the woods to raid farmsteads at dead of night. Protection was much needed in the long and turbulent period of the many Viking invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries before the Danelaw was established. It seems likely that the Anglo-Saxons conceived the earthworks as part of a defence system, as they were in other parts of the country. It was common practice for earth mounds to be built around settlements as defence boundaries.

The copse is cool and welcoming after the heat of the open fields, the air heavily scented with the humus of rotting vegetation and moisture-locked soil. A little light filters though the fine canopy of ash and sallow, but not enough to dry out the wood after the drenching of the last few days. Rays of sunlight sparkle on the woodland floor. Last night the branches were dripping and bent under the weight of rain; today the boughs of the ash are still heavy and there is a sombre air among the trees. Our mood changes as we walk through them, looking for lesions on the bark of young ash. At first it is a game to try to spot the signs and I’m keen to show off my new knowledge. But Lizzie is walking fast ahead of me, and doesn’t want to stay too long to examine the diseased trees. We become silent, and I feel as I do when visiting a sick relative or friend in hospital: I want to stay and cheer them up but feel helpless.

We leave the wood to the plaintive whistle of a chiffchaff, the two notes, one higher than the other, seeming to call us back. As we stroll past the meadow towards the car, I’m aware of the trees whispering behind me. I turn back, but the sound fades. Yet as I drive away from the village, with the windows wound down, I hear it again, many voices muttering, not words or syllables, but musical notes. It reminds me of the description of the spirit chorus that the soul seers claimed to hear in Montaillou, France, in the fourteenth century. Many occupants of this wood are passing into spirit form and, clamour as they may, nothing can save them.

In my rear-view mirror, the dark body of the wood recedes from view, like a rain cloud passing by. I notice more ash with exposed antler branches and think of the many that will fall victim and die on the roadsides over the coming years.

The Science behind Ash Dieback

People up and down the country are becoming more aware of the plight of the ash and, in an area outside Norwich, scientists are working to halt the progress of Chalara fraxinea. The John Innes Centre was set up as a charity in 1910 by John Innes, a landowner and entrepreneur from London, and has since been established as a centre for plant science and microbiology of international repute funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Research Council. The original buildings date back to the 1960s, when the John Innes Centre moved to Norwich, and the newer buildings have clustered around them in regimented designs of varying styles. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought I was on the edge of a housing estate in London’s Peckham or Brixton. When I walk across the car park on the same day in June that I visit Ashwellthorpe, I see that the buildings are softened by grass and a few clumps of trees.

Dan MacLean greets me in the reception area and walks me through a pleasant outdoor garden to the laboratories. They are empty, and looking through the glass wall makes me feel as though I’m being shown an exhibit in a museum. I remember as a child going round a futuristic exhibition at London’s Design Museum of domestic life in the twenty-first century. The laboratories are a bit like that: high metal contraptions and long melamine tables, all very clinical. In fact, they resemble characterless kitchens, which need a few dirty plates and a fruit bowl to make them real. I can see four, each visible to the rest through glass panes, lending them a competitive edge – I imagine young scientists coming to show each other how it’s done. At the far end, there is a flat-fronted grey machine, called an athemizer, where samples are frozen so that they break down into tiny particles or strands that can be analysed. There are little bottles, too, covered with tin foil, filled with transparent brown liquids.

The John Innes Centre is at the forefront of the fight against Ash Dieback. Daniel MacLean works for the Sainsbury Laboratory as a bio-informatician. He analyses DNA sequences on a computer. Ash trees are famous for distorting the division between male and female because they can be hermaphrodite, and a few are. They are often thought to be wind-pollinated because they do not produce petals or sepals and the flowers appear before the leaf grows. Pollen is a kind of plant sperm that is often carried by bees or other insects to mix with female structures. When greatly magnified, electron micrograph scans of pollen grains show them to be like circular pumice stones with tiny holes. They are pale yellow in colour and cluster together. When a tree trembles, its pollen forms a visible haze. Unlike the female trees, males do not produce fruit or seeds. The flowers of female parts on ash trees are purple and grow into seeds attached to ‘keys’ – so-called because they resemble old-fashioned keys. They turn rapidly in the wind and are also known as ‘spinners’. Like humans, each ash will be unique but will share common characteristics.

In the autumn of 2012, when Ash Dieback was first found in the wild in the UK, Dr Anne Edwards, who also works at the John Innes Centre, took a piece of wood from a sick ash tree in Ashwellthorpe Lower Wood to the centre. Other scientists there took a DNA sample from it and confirmed that it contained the pathogen Chalara fraxinea. A cross-section of wood with Ash Dieback shows what resemble ink blots on top of the concentric rings. Windblown spores of Chalara fraxinea infect leaves. The fungus grows down the leaf stem and into the core of the tree. Trees with Chalara fraxinea are more susceptible to other pests and pathogens, such as Armillaria fungi or honey fungus.

Research into Ash Dieback aims to find out how the pathogen is getting into the trees. The work has been accelerated by the use of crowd sourcing, which enables people from around the world to make contributions. Whereas before Dan would have had to prepare a paper and wait for a conference, through crowd sourcing, or publishing results straight away, he receives feedback almost immediately. He is helping to build a map of the areas in the ash genome – the complete set of genes present in each cell of an organism – where susceptible trees differ from those that are resistant. Dan is a member of the Nornex Consortium, headed by Professor Allan Downie, leading the investigation into Ash Dieback, made up of various partners, which include the Sainsbury Laboratory, the universities of Edinburgh, York, Exeter and Copenhagen, Forest Research, the Food and Research Agency, the Genome Analysis Centre, and the Forest and Landscape Institute, Norway. Nornex Group scientists are working with Danish scientists who identified the so-called Tree 35, which has low susceptibility. If they can identify the unique genetic features that reduce its chance of being infected by Ash Dieback, it will help them to breed an ash resistant to Ash Dieback in Britain. Perhaps the tree contains an enzyme that inhibits the disease. Maybe its bark is thicker. They are trying to find the answers to these questions because Chalara fraxinea is such a virulent fungus.

Identifying resistant trees could speed up the process of replacing those ashes that will probably die of disease. In their search for sources of resistance, the task of scientists at the John Innes Centre and Sainsbury’s Laboratory is made harder by the fact that there is almost free movement of plants: our border controls expose our native plants to exotic diseases because security is less tight than it should be. Dan confirms that saplings are grown in Europe then brought to these islands, which makes it difficult to monitor their provenance.

Early in August, Dan and his colleagues release the ash game Fraxinus on Facebook. In its first six months it attracts an overwhelming number of players, who score points by putting together sequences of coloured leaves on their computer screens, matching them to genetic data that scientists working on Chalara fraxinea have found. Scientists may use the data the game produces to help analyse the susceptibility of a certain tree to the disease or to probe genomic DNA.

At the end of August 2013, Antony Milek, a student, sets up a vigil to guard an ash just over his garden fence in Kitson Hill Road, Mirfield, in West Yorkshire. It is in danger of being felled because the rest of the mature trees close to it, nearly thirty altogether, have gone: workmen believed that permission had been granted for the land to be sold to developers. He attracts the attention of the local papers, who report on his activities. Antony sits in the shade of the tree, which has been there all his life, at the bottom of his garden: as he is so close to it, the workmen cannot risk felling the tree. The land in question was once a refuge for birds and small mammals. The ash towers over the fence; it has two trunks, and appears to be in perfect health. A protection order should have been placed on it because Chalara fraxinea threatens ash trees.

On 5 June in Arkon, Ohio, a woman is arrested for sitting in an old ash tree that developers are waiting to chop down. This is the culmination of a week-long protest by local people and supporters who have occupied the tree in an attempt to persuade the local council and the land owners not to fell it. The ‘irony’, the local paper reports, is that it is only a matter of time before the Emerald Ash Borer, which has already eaten billions of America’s trees, will probably destroy this one too. Yet surely that provides a stronger argument to protect the tree for the duration of its life. The protesters are asking only to be allowed to enjoy the tree for as long as it lives, but the council and landowners have decided that, if its life is limited, they may as well remove it at their convenience. During the week of protest, the owners change their argument from strategic planning to health and safety: they claim that the tree’s roots are raising a sidewalk, thereby presenting a potential hazard.

Financial gain is placed above human wellbeing. Clearly local people feel that the tree is an important focal point for their community. The furore surrounding its fate shows the intense connection that people feel for it and the stories that will be lost when the tree has gone. For a time it will be missed. Ash trees in Britain will be mourned, too, but let us hope that the John Innes Centre, and others like it, are successful in their endeavours to develop a variety of ash that is resistant to Dieback.

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