The Surviving Ash of the Hoofdweg

Most Dutch ash trees of this age are dead or going. Ash dieback reached the Netherlands around 2010, a fungus out of east Asia that the European ash has no answer to, and it has worked through the country's ash population ever since, killing the crown downward from the twigs. A small fraction of trees turn out to be genetically tolerant, and those few matter enormously, because they are the parents of whatever ash the Netherlands still has in fifty years. This one is still standing on the Hoofdweg. The register puts its planting between 1920 and 1930, which makes it about a century old, on ground that had only been dry land for about seventy years when it went in. Ash is the tree everything used to be made of: cart shafts, tool handles, ladders, oars, early aircraft frames. It bends a long way before it gives and it gives without splintering, so it went into anything that had to absorb a shock. It is also the last tree in a Dutch hedgerow to come into leaf and among the first to drop, which leaves it bare for more than half the year. Winter is when it is easiest to name from the road: the buds are matt black and shaped like small hooves, and nothing else here has them. The chestnut a few doors up is the older of the two. The register is the only source for either.