The Variegated Green Ash

Alexandra Park holds over seven thousand trees, and this is the one a specialist stops at. The council's survey calls it a very rare tree, planted at the turn of the 20th century, and a potential champion, which is the surveyor's own careful wording: a possible national record-holder rather than a confirmed one. That planting period is the only date anywhere on this page, and it puts the tree at roughly 110 to 135 years, a generation younger than the park it grows in. Green ash is a North American tree, planted in Britain as an ornamental. The variegated form is the uncommon part: leaves that come out marked and streaked with cream rather than plain green, so the whole crown reads paler than the trees around it, which is how you pick it out at a distance. Alexandra Park opened in 1870, sixty acres of Victorian municipal park between Whalley Range and Moss Side, and it is still a working local park rather than a collection. The survey does not say where in those sixty acres the ash stands, and the pin marks the park. The Friends of Alexandra Park run tree walks and will know the exact tree, which is the shortest route to it.