Ash

The ash, Fraxinus excelsior, is a tall, tough, straight-grained tree, and in Norse cosmology it is the frame of the cosmos itself: Yggdrasil, the world-tree that binds the nine worlds, is named an ash in the Prose Edda, its roots and branches holding heaven, earth and the underworld together, with a well of wisdom beneath it and Odin hanging on it to win the runes. The same tradition makes the ash the origin of humanity, the first man, Askr, whose name simply means ash, was made from a piece of ash-wood found on the shore by the gods, as the first woman Embla was made from another tree.

European ash populations now face a genuine modern crisis: ash dieback, a fungal disease caused by Hymenoscyphus fraxineus and first identified spreading through Europe in the early 1990s before reaching Britain around 2012, has killed a large proportion of the continent's ash trees and is expected to kill the great majority of those remaining, a disaster on a scale that threatens to remove the very tree that stood, in Norse cosmology, at the centre of the world. Conservationists now watch for a small proportion of naturally resistant trees in the hope of eventually breeding a disease-tolerant ash back into the landscape.

The ash's cosmic role rests on the real qualities of its timber, which is exceptionally strong, straight and shock-absorbing, the standard wood for spear-shafts, tool handles and, later, oars and aircraft frames. Odin's spear Gungnir and the ash-spears of Homeric heroes reflect this: the weapon-tree and the world-tree are the same tree seen two ways. Culpeper, working in the quite separate framework of astrological herbalism, assigns the ash to the Sun, and used its keys and bark in his remedies. The through-line from a tough, useful, fast-growing hardwood to a cosmic axis and a source of humankind is the familiar pattern, a genuinely important tree gathering the largest meanings a culture had to give.

That same shock-absorbing strength keeps ash in demand today for specialised sporting equipment: it remains the traditional wood for the hurley used in Irish hurling and was for generations the standard timber for baseball bats and tennis rackets before other materials largely replaced it, a modern sporting afterlife of exactly the mechanical toughness that once made the wood fit for spear-shafts and a cosmic axis alike. Ash timber's reputation for combining strength with flexibility rather than rigidity is precisely why it resists the sudden shock of a swung bat or a thrown spear alike without shattering, a single mechanical property running unbroken from Homeric battle to the modern sports field.