Fraxinus excelsior Seeds | Common Ash
LATIN NAME: Fraxinus excelsior
COMMON NAME: Common Ash, European Ash
Plant Profile
Common ash is a large deciduous tree, reaching thirty metres or more on good lowland soil, with a long clear trunk in woodland and a broader, looser crown in the open. Old trees develop deeply fissured grey bark, while young growth stays smooth, and the winter silhouette is distinctive: stout, opposite, slightly angled twigs with that unmistakable black bud at the tip of every one.
Ash flowers in dense, dark purple-brown clusters on the previous year’s wood, opening well before the leaves and carrying no petals, because the tree is wind-pollinated and has no need to advertise. Individual trees may be male, female or mixed, and a single tree can change its balance of sexes from one season to the next. The absence of petals is the reason the spring ash looks so sombre next to the flowering cherries beside it.
Fertilised flowers ripen into single-seeded samaras, the familiar ash keys, each a small seed body in a long twisted wing. They hang in dense bunches through autumn, and because the wing is offset, the key spins as it falls and travels well away from the parent. Ash keys are also buoyant, so a proportion of every crop is carried downstream by floodwater, which is one reason the tree lines so many European riverbanks.
Recent decades have brought a serious disease to European ash, caused by the fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, which almost certainly arrived from East Asia, where the native ashes tolerate it. Infection begins in the leaf litter, moves into the shoot, and kills twigs and branches progressively, leaving characteristic dark lesions on the bark and a thinning crown; young trees often die outright. Asian species such as Fraxinus mandshurica and Fraxinus chinensis are markedly more resistant, and they are now central to breeding work aimed at a tolerant European population, though no seedling should ever be sold as immune.
Science & Biotechnology
The leaves are compound and opposite, divided into seven to thirteen oval leaflets set along a central stalk and closed, unusually, by a single terminal leaflet rather than ending in a pair. Leaflets are toothed, bright green and arranged in opposite pairs along the rachis, which is itself grooved along the upper face. Because the buds are opposite rather than alternate, a bare ash twig can be told from a walnut or a rowan at a glance.
Uses & Benefits
Ash wood is pale, ring-porous and unusually elastic, with a high ratio of strength to weight and a capacity to absorb shock that few European timbers match. That single property explains its traditional markets: cart shafts, ladder rungs, oars and boat ribs, tool handles, hockey sticks and the Irish hurley.
Ash is one of the best coppicing trees in Europe, and managed ash stools have been cut on long rotations for poles, tool handles and hop poles. Where the object was leaf for livestock rather than wood, the tree was pollarded instead, cropping the branches above the reach of cattle so that the regrowth could be cut as winter browse. Ash foliage is high in calcium and was once a real feed resource in upland Britain.
Sports-goods makers still specify ash for shafts and handles because it flexes and springs back instead of snapping, and the best hurleys are shaped from butt-grown stools where the grain runs straight for the length of the stick.
Growing from Seed
Sow the keys as soon as they are ripe, while they are still plump and pale, because ash seed loses viability quickly once it dries out. Broadcast them in a drill and cover lightly with fine soil or sand, no deeper than about twice the thickness of a key. Ash seed carries a deep dormancy and rarely rises evenly in its first spring outdoors; the reliable technique is a cool, moist bed, either a covered frame or a shaded seedbed, with the keys kept damp through the winter so that emergence comes in flushes over more than one season. Patience, not warmth, is the variable that matters.
Keep the bed weeded but never let it bake dry, and firm the surface after sowing so the keys sit in close contact with moisture. Once seedlings stand a hand-span tall, lift the strongest into individual pots, since ash makes a long straight taproot quickly and resents root disturbance later.
Our Take
Grow ash for timber if you have the room, and grow it for the astonishing spring silhouette if you have only a hedgerow. Its relatives are a useful reminder that the olive family is not all warm-country plants: Chinese ash has shown real tolerance of the dieback fungus, and trifoliate forsythia is a shrubby cousin that flowers before its leaves in the same way. Grown on a hot dry slope, the olive completes the family picture.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Common Ash: