Is it too late to save Britain’s ash trees?

Once we wrote poems when we lost our trees. Now we just watch them rot. In 1820 John Clare was moved to mark the end of a single tree he had loved: ‘It hoples Withers droops & dies.’ In 2020, so many English trees are dying that it would take a library of Clares to record the casualties.

This year, locked-down in Derbyshire, I have been watching skeletons amid the green, hoping that they will return to life. Almost all have. The last of the great field ashes are only just coming into leaf, scarred by late frosts and drought. A row of oaks I ride by most days has dead leaves that crunch in my fingers when I reach up from my horse. The frost got these too — but beneath the brown there are fresh shoots.

Little things like these ease the sadness that hits hard when I think of what is happening to our trees. As a child I can remember the dead elms standing out from hedgerows, and the shock of their loss was huge. Edward Heath’s government launched a campaign with a jaunty slogan: ‘Plant a tree in ’73.’ The echo came back — ‘Plant some more in ’74’ — but the elm went anyway: 60 million died in Britain. Their descendants struggle on as saplings. We have a few. But a fungus spread by the elm bark beetle gets them all before maturity.

Now it is the turn of the ash. When the Asian fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus (ash dieback) was first reported in England in October 2012, there were promises of task forces and action. But it kept spreading and now we talk about it less. It is in every English county and you can see the effects in almost every woodland.