I have just got back from a woodland charity talk. I was not looking forward to it at all, firstly because I had visions of getting bogged down in a fractious discussion of ash dieback disease, and secondly because as of yesterday morning I still hadn't heard from the organisers since they booked me this time last year. I forgot to ring them yesterday before going out, so called the person who sent the confirmation letter when I got back. She sounded pretty fractious, telling me that she'd been ill and wasn't doing the bookings any more, and demanding to know 'what I wanted, exactly'. What I wanted was to find out whether they were still expecting me, any special instructions about finding the hall, what time it would be open and all the usual sorts of things you would want to know before packing up your car and driving twenty miles to do a lecture. I said I was sorry she'd been ill and sorry to trouble her, if she could just give me the number of the person now doing the bookings I'd ring them, but she said she didn't know who it was, although she assured me the meeting was still on.
I thought I'd have to leave it at that, but set off at lunchtime with a dark sense of foreboding that the handover to the new bookings secretary might not have worked, and I might arrive to find I was double booked with somebody else. It was quite a spread-out village when I got there, but I found the hall without any false turnings, either through luck or because instinct born of long practice told me it was going to be down the hill and not up towards the church, at the first point where I had to choose between left and right. They were expecting me, and turned out to be a perfectly friendly bunch of ladies, who claimed they had tried to ring me but the number they'd got hadn't worked, so something obviously got scrambled at some stage of the communications.
The chairman mentioned the dreadful news about ash trees in her introduction, and I'd already decided I'd meet that head on, and start with a potted summary of what I knew and how I saw things so far, with the disclaimer that I was a volunteer and was not a qualified tree pathologist. I suggested leaving questions and discussion about chalara to the end of the rest of the talk, to avoid the risk of being trapped in a long, indignant, why did they, why didn't they series of complaints presented as questions which I would be unable to answer, given that I don't know the answers and wasn't in charge. The ladies accepted that as a plan, and sat looking meek and sad while I ran through a potted history of public (and my) awareness of ash dieback, and my views on what was likely to happen now. There were very few questions when we got to the end.
I am actually hopping mad about ash dieback in the UK. We all (and I include myself in the criticism) seem to have fatalistically and supinely walked into the jaws of disaster. From which you will gather that I believe the disease is already too widely spread to be contained, that we are going to lose a large part of our ash population, and it is too late to do anything about that. Our best hope is to identify resistant trees and grow their progeny on, but that won't restore Fraxinus excelsior to the countryside in my lifetime. And it is such a beautiful tree. In recent weeks as I've been driving around the lanes, or working in the garden, I've been mentally deducting the ashes from the landscape. North east Essex won't be denuded of tree cover. There is more oak than ash, and several other species as well, but ash provides the tallest trees in many woodlands (the clue's in the name. Excelsior. Gloria in excelsis deo, Glory to God in the highest). I shall miss it dreadfully when it's gone.
I am stunned that most people, including me, only heard about this at the start of October when the Guardian ran an article. I am too mean to buy a daily paper, but read the broadsheets that are freely available on line. That's the Telegraph, Guardian and Independent. I am a BBC junkie, reading their website and listening to R4 news, current affairs and environmental programmes. I am a member of the Woodland Trust, the National Trust, the RHS and the RSPB. No journalist and none of these conservation charities seem to have picked up on ash dieback. Landscape managers, including those of National Parks and the Woodland Trust itself, were planting imported ash saplings, having apparently asked about the genetic provenance of the trees supplied, that is were they grown from UK seed, but not enquired about the biosecurity aspect of where they were actually grown. I am a mere plant centre assistant and gardener, doing some voluntary work on the side, but what were all the conservation professionals doing? Were they asleep? The only body to have emerged with any credit at all, as far as I can see, is the Horticultural Trades Association, who wrote to Defra as early as 2009 asking for an immediate ban on the import of ash. They were brushed aside and ignored by the authorities until it was too late. A ban came in, far too late, and the government held a Cobra meeting last Friday, by which time the disease was so widespread they might as well have not bothered.
There seems to be a lot we still don't know. If it is the case that some UK cases have resulted not from imports but from spores spread on the wind across the North Sea, then there will have been nothing we could have done in the long run anyway. I suppose that might make us feel a little better. The best we can hope for now, apart from the fact that in the long run the ash will almost certainly regenerate, is that politicians might finally start taking tree health seriously. That means funding research, and being as tough as we need to be on imports. I know we are part of the EU, but we are also an island. We can keep rabies out, why not plant diseases?
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