The Ash of the Parque del Runa

This ash is 5.25 metres round at chest height, and that is not even why it is in the book. Pamplona's 2010 survey of old and singular trees chose it for its form of growth, which it records in one word, recepado. That is a tree cut back low on the trunk so that it sprouts again, a treatment ash takes better than most. What came back is 19 metres tall with a crown 18.4 metres across, nearly as wide as it is high. A trunk regrown from a cut can carry several stems, so the girth may well take in more than one. Ash was a working tree. The book notes that its wood is flexible and tough, which made it the wood for tool handles, and that its leaves fed livestock, the branches cut at height in the way called trasmoche. Old ashes, it adds, often turn up beside shepherds' huts. Whether this one was cut for wood or for fodder, the book does not say. The ground suits the story. The Parque del Runa lies in the Rochapea, on the flat north bank of the Arga, a district the same book describes as farming country until its recent urbanisation. In Navarra the common ash belongs to the wetter Atlantic north, along rivers such as the Bidasoa, and it likes fresh, deep soil. Nobody has put an age on it. If you know this tree's history, tell us.