EP 16 emerald ash borer.tif

Emerald Ash Borers in were discovered in  Pondicherry Park last May.

 

Howdy neighbor! 

There’s a sad little thing I noticed last fall while racking up firewood, and at intervals again this winter as we burned it. Among the various hardwoods split and cut stove-length in our pile, for every piece of maple, oak, beech, birch and locust hauled in from the woodshed, I often found myself handling big, beautiful half-rounds of ash, split last year from trees of diameter six, eight, and even 12 inches across. The lordly ash, native to both the New and the Old World, with its distinctive, diamond-furrowed bark fit for the making of Indian baskets, its white, straight-grained wood hardy to the uses of tool handles and ball bats, and its broad, pointed leaves with their many medicinal virtues and nigh-mythic power of repelling snakes. An eminently useful tree, and often in past years I have marveled to think of ash and its wonderful versatility. But this year, a more disquieting thought crossed my mind. For now, as I held up a piece of split round ash a full foot in diameter, I instead found myself thinking, “You know, this may be about the last year I’ll ever find a piece of ash this big in my woodpile.”

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