Ashes to ashes: How a foreign fungus is killing off Britain's ash trees

Throughout Kent and East Anglia, the elegant, luxuriant deep green of late summer ash woodland has been reduced to a threadbare tangle of branches and twigs – the victim of ash dieback. Nick Johannsen explains how even urgent action may not be enough to save this stately beast

The fungus causes leaf loss, lesions in the wood and on the bark, and ultimately the dieback of the tree's crown (Getty)

As a child growing up in East Anglia, two mighty elm trees were anchors in my world. Even more feral than my own children, wherever we wandered above the Dedham Vale, two gigantic elm trees signalled home. Without warning these beautiful twins were quickly and ruthlessly cut down by Dutch elm disease. Our welcoming elms became giant, gloomy monoliths, quickly felled, logged and stacked.

Dutch elm disease was good for the chainsaw and log stove market. Across Britain there ensued the removal of dead and dying elms on a drastic scale, which created a dramatic diminishment of much loved landscapes. In my own East Anglian clay land, the change was appalling, lanes which were once tunnels of cathedral-like elm trees became scrappy hedges; field trees felled and not replaced, woods completely altered, the landscapes changed forever. When my father died nearly 40 years later he had not finished burning the logs he cut and stacked even from our tiny farm.

And now for ash, perhaps our most graceful tree, the die seems cast. Ash dieback was first recorded in Britain in 2012, although there is speculation that it was here years before. Also known as Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, is a fungal pathogen and a most serious disease of ash trees. It is stealthier than Dutch elm; the death of ash trees is slower: there are moments of apparent recovery, but the eventual decline seems irrecoverable. The estimates are that between 95 per cent and 98 per cent of our ash trees are threatened; this would seem to be borne out by what we are witnessing in some of the ash dominated woodlands in east Kent.