Trees, Shown to the Children

by C. E. Smith

Then you’re sure to have a soak.”

—Old Saying.

If the Oak is well named the King of the woods, to the Ash belongs the honour of being called Queen, the wood’s fairest. She is a queen with an ancient history. In the dim long ago there must have been Ash trees, for we read that the great spear of Achilles was an “ashen spear”; also, that the gods held council under the boughs of a great Ash tree: on its highest branches sat an eagle; round its root a serpent lay coiled; and a tiny squirrel ran up and down the branches carrying messages from one to the other.

In much later times the Ash tree was held to have magic powers of healing. Sick babies were said to be cured if they passed through a cleft made in its trunk; and there are many tales of men and animals who recovered from illness on touching an Ash twig gathered from a tree in which a shrew mouse had been buried.

Nowadays we have grown so wise that we think differently about these things, and we love the Ash tree because of its beauty, and are grateful for the many ways in which the wood is useful to us.

You should try to find an Ash tree (1) in early spring. It is one of the easiest trees to recognise before it is clothed in leaves.

The trunk is very straight, and has none of the knobs and bosses which grow on the Oak and Elm tree trunks. When the Ash tree is still young the bark is a pale grey colour—ash-colour, we call it—and it is very smooth. But as the tree grows older the bark cracks into many irregular upright ridges, which remind you of the rimples left by the waves on a sandy sea-shore.

At first the lower branches grow straight out from the trunk, but soon they curve gracefully downwards; then they rise again, and the tips point upward toward the sky.

Notice the tips of these branches—they are quite different from all other tree tips. In an Ash tree you will not see a network of delicate branching twigs outlined against the sky. Each branch ends in a stout pale grey twig, which is slightly flattened at the tip, as if it had been pinched between two fingers when still soft. Beyond this flattened tip you see two fat black buds (4), and there are smaller black buds at the sides of the twig. It is these curious black buds at the tips and on the sides of the twig which will make it easy for you to distinguish the Ash tree from every other.

Long after the other trees have put on their young green leaves the Ash tree stands bare and leafless, waiting till the frost and cold winds are gone before its black buds will unfold. Then out it comes, flowers first. The sooty buds at the sides of the twig open, and you see that they have dark brown linings, and that in the middle of each bud there lies a thick bunch of purple stamen heads (6), crowded together like grains of purple corn; these are the Ash tree flowers (8).