The Ashes and the Fringe Tree 



and drink up the moisture at a marvellous rate. A few trees will 

 soon cover such a tract, sending their seeds broadcast, and throw- 

 ing up suckers from their roots. 



It was the Indians who taught our forefathers to weave 

 baskets of black-ash splints. The wood is split into sticks an 

 inch or so wide and two or three inches thick. These are bent over 

 a block, and the strain breaks the loose tissue that forms the 

 spring wood, and separates the bands of dense, tough summer 

 wood into thin strips suitable for basket weaving. 



The grain of black ash is normally straight, but warty excres- 

 cences called "burls" form on the trunk sometimes, and these 

 show wonderful contortions of the grain. Innumerable radiating 

 pins, or abortive branches, keep on growing within the wood, 

 each the centre of a set of circles or wavy lines, which show 

 when a "burl" is cut across. Bowls hollowed out of single burls 

 and polished show exquisitely waved lines as delicate as those in 

 a banded agate. 



European ash sometimes shows a twisted and warped con- 

 dition of the fibres known to woodworkers as "ram's-horn" and 

 "fiddle-back" ash. Knotty parts of stems and roots once went 

 under the trade name of "green ebony," and fancy boxes and 

 other articles made of it and polished brought extravagant 

 prices. "When our woodmen light upon it, they make what 

 money they will of it," says Evelyn. And he tells of a famous 

 table made of an old ash tree on whose polished surface "divers 

 strange figures of fish, men and beasts" were discernible in the 

 grain of the wood! Another enthusiast, with still livelier imagina- 

 tion, saw in the cleft trunk of an ash tree, before it was polished 

 even, "the various vestments of a priest, with the rosary and 

 other symbols of his office!" 



Red Ash (Fraxinus Pennsylvanica, Marsh.) A small, spread- 

 ing tree, 40 to 60 feet high, with irregular, compact head of 

 twiggy branches. Bark reddish, closely furrowed, scaly; young 

 twigs pubescent. Buds small, dark brown, nodes close together. 

 Leaies 10 to 12 inches long, of 7 to 9 leaflets, lanceolate, coarsely 

 serrate, on short stalks, smooth, yellow-green above, silvery 

 pubescence on petioles and leaf linings; yellow in fall. Flowers, 

 May, with leaves; dioecious, in hairy panicles; pistillate green- 

 ish, inconspicuous. Fruit slender, clustered keys, i to 2 inches 

 long, on hairy stems; wing i inch long and extending half way 



435 



