Monday 14 November 2016

Ash tree

I snapped up an ash tree the other day - the one that lives at the bottom of the garden, near the compost heap.  It was looking a bit naked, after the few windy days we've had recently.  It's fair to say that winter is approaching - more often than not the days are damp, dark and a bit miserable.

There was nice light around last Sunday so I took a wee dander about the garden and pointed the camera skywards for a change.  Printed on a new one for me, Ilford MG Art 300, which is a very nice paper to hold in the hand.  Lovely textured eggshell surface, it has.  Not the cheapest on the block, mind, so it's not an everyday paper.
We have a lot of ash trees around us in The Liberties.  The females are the ones with seeds, of which there are usually thousands, which hang in big brown bunches at this time of year, not quite ready to drop just yet. Every year I pull out loads of little ash tree-lets as they take root all over the place. And boy are those suckers hard to get out - even a 6-inch high treelet requires a fair old tug to remove it from Mother Earth.  Makes me wonder what the roots of a 60-foot tree might look like.

2 comments:

  1. I miss ash trees. They used to be very common here in middle America, before a little beetle started boring into them and killing them. I had 21 ash trees in my yard, but last year discovered they all had died. They all had to come out. It's the same story around my neighborhood, and all over America actually.

    https://blog.jimgrey.net/2015/06/10/goodbye-ash-trees-goodbye-money/

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    Replies
    1. Wow - 21 is a lot of ash trees to have to remove from your property. We had to take one big one out last year, which was rotting from the inside.

      I read that in Northern Ireland they took out 100,000 young ash trees last year, in an attempt to prevent the spread of disease (ash dieback). If it gets a hold around these parts the countryside is going to look a whole different - and not in a better way.

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