Mary Spalding
Ashes to Ashes: The Demise of the World Tree
In the corner of my woodland “room” in the old growth forest behind my house stood a tree so tall and straight that I could not see the leaves on its lowest branches, and so for years I admired it but had no idea of its species. I was more interested in learning the names of all the sweet little wildings growing on the ground around it--wake robin trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, fairy bells, and other forest flowers, along with numerous ferns, mosses, and mushrooms.
If I’d tried a little harder, I would have learned that the deeply etched diamond pattern of this tree’s bark was distinctive to its species, but it wasn’t until I found some squat, yellow-brown, delicious-smelling (but apparently not choicely edible) mushrooms that I identified as ash tree boletes growing nearby that I finally came to know the tree’s name. As I then began to learn its storied history and importance to the more-than-human world, I realized I’d had no idea of the age-old value of the ash tree to our forests, ecology, homes, and businesses. The more I read, the more amazed I became by the species and the magnificent specimen in my woods (a Fraxinus americana), whose trunk, at well over a yard in diameter, suggested it could have been as much as 100 years old.
Apparently, I was not alone in my ignorance. In his 2021 book Ash, Edward Parker says that ash “go largely unnoticed in towns and cities. Even great writers and artists have failed to immortalize the ash tree.” Shakespeare, whose use of flora in the plots of his plays was the topic of my aborted PhD dissertation, only mentions the ash once, according to Parker.
Yet it was not long after coming to appreciate this tree that I learned of its devastation in the form of a tiny alien traveling across the Americas. One sad day my son pointed at the forest canopy behind our house and said, “That tree is dead.” When I saw the skeletal fingers rising above the green of the living trees, I knew immediately the alien had killed my ash.
The emerald ash borer (EAB) was first identified in the Americas in Michigan in 2002, mostly likely arriving in a shipping crate, as these things do. Tree ring studies reveal it has been here since the mid-1990s. As of August 2023, the United States Department of Agriculture reports the insect in 36 states plus the District of Columbia; these little beetles with jewel-like wings have killed tens of millions of Fraxinus in the U.S. alone. The EAB lays its eggs in the bark of its favored ash trees (though, ominously, it also attacks lilacs and other species). Its larvae hatch and begin mining the tree for nourishment, creating squiggly tunnels that cross and cut off the tree’s arteries until the host can no longer nourish itself. From the time of first impact, the tree lives only three to five years. So devastating are the EAB that they are known in scientific circles as the “wildfires of the East.”
Frighteningly, dead ash trees do not behave in the way of most dead trees, with limbs falling slowly over the years and the trunk eventually toppling in a storm. No. Because of the damage to its internal structure, within a few years of death an ash tree snaps quite suddenly, leaving an eerie 10- or 20-foot obelisk with a tattered crown at the top. According to the Purdue University Forestry Department, “It is not uncommon to have sizable limbs snap 30 feet off the ground on a calm day.” Often, however, the tree falls with most of its branches intact, meaning its chances of hitting something or someone is far greater than usual. Many deaths on the ground and on the road in recent years have been caused by falling ash.
The cost of removing these trees is extremely high due to the dangers they pose, and on my fixed income I cannot afford to have mine taken down. It’s in the forest and leaning away from my house, so I’m perhaps foolishly taking my chances. And so I’ve watched as large rafts of that diamond bark fall away, and the tree leans more and more, and its once-stalwart strength pales and weakens. Ashes to ashes, I tell myself, but this is small comfort. And, so, in what hopefully is not a form of obituary to the ash, but rather a celebration of its long life, I share what I’ve learned about these trees.
On the more mundane front, ash trees have served us well. Humanity’s earliest known tools, spears, were made of ash. In fact, “fraxinus” means “spear.” Ash wood is smoother, lighter colored, and lighter weight than oak. The wood has been and continues to be (but for how long?) fashioned into tool handles, oars, skis, flooring, doors, millwork, and furniture. Its inner springiness makes it ideal for a new use beginning in the twentieth-century: baseball bats.
Ash wood is much vaunted as firewood, probably due to its low-moisture content--and EAB-eaten ash can still be used for this purpose. (Because of EAB, it is important not to move firewood from its original location.) Indeed, ash will burn when still green, which Parker believes made it valuable when learning to use fire transformed human society. The “Firewood Poem,” written by Lady Celia Congreve and first published in 1930, charmingly describes the characteristics, good and bad, of different types of hearth wood. The poem culminates with these lines: “Ash wet or ash dry / A king shall warm his slippers by.”
Ash has been used for nutrition and healing since its earliest mention in historical documents. Some of these uses are pure superstition, while its true pharmacotherapeutic qualities are being validated by medical research today. An example of the former is the rite practiced throughout early Europe and even into the twentieth century of “passing through”--pulling or passing a sick child, often naked, through a natural opening in a tree believed to have healing properties--frequently an ash.
The world tree Ygdrassil from Norse myth is believed to have been a European ash ((Fraxinus excelior). Yggdrasil connects the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, with branches in the heavens and roots in the underworld. It is ironic that this image has become so popular in the United States--in large part due to video games that borrow heavily from Norse myth--just as our ash trees are becoming history themselves. The first man, according to the Norse, was named “Askr,” which means “ash.” Both Odin’s and Thor’s spears were made of ash. The image of the God Odin hanging from Yggdrasil during his sacrificial travails, as described in the Edda, perhaps as lore presages Christ on the Rood.
Similar “world” or “cosmic” trees--most of them ash--occur in folklore across the world. Of the Druid’s five most sacred trees, three of them were ash. (Our mountain ash (Sorbus americana),related to what is known as “rowan” (S. aucuparia) in Great Britain, is also considered magical but is not related to the genus discussed here.) Saint Patrick claimed to banish all snakes from the Irish isle with--what else?--an ash limb. Ash was commonly used in magic wands; Gandalf the Grey’s staff was made of ash. In Greek myth, ash nymphs nursed the baby Zeus with the manna that exudes from the tree. “Ash sap,” says Parker, “was still being used as an infant’s first food in locations such as Scotland into the nineteenth century” and is “still used in Sicily for medicine.”
Not only we humans rely on ash trees, of course. The dying off of ash trees will deeply alter the millennia-old coevolution of these trees with other species, from the smallest invertebrate to larger animals such as deer that graze on ash leaves, birds such as bobwhite, purple finch, and pine grosbeak that feed on the samsuras, as well as other small animals that use the tree for food, according to Lake Forest College’s Environmental Studies. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation identifies 98 ash-dependent insects--meaning, of course, that if all the ash trees die these species will either adapt or go extinct--and, if the latter, what happens to the next being on the food chain? And then?
Among the only good news in this sad saga is that the European ash and green ash (F. pennsylvanica) have proven somewhat resistant to EAB, and scientists continue to study ways to eradicate the pest. They even look to woodpeckers as potential control, but my woods are filled with many species of woodpeckers, even pileated, and they did not save my ash trees. (I see several slender eerie obelisks deeper in my woods.) However, dendrologists continue to hope, and so must we. Luring and trapping the beetle with pheromones, introducing parasitic wasps, developing an EAB-specific pesticide, and other potential controls look promising.
These efforts are good news, indeed, for we must ask ourselves, “What happens to the world when the world tree dies?”
Mary Spalding grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, exploring the greenbelt around Sligo Creek and vacationing with her family in the Appalachian Mountains. As a young mother, she fulfilled a childhood dream and moved full-time to those mountains, settling with her two small sons in Allegany County. Over the years, she completed college degrees and worked in a variety of roles related to academia. In 2017, she married Richard Kerns, and the new grandparents are now happily semi-retired and enjoying woods and wildlife as often as possible.
Tile: John Sell Cotman, Wooded Landscape, probably 1841, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington