The Ash. 



MicHAUx saySj that it sometimes attains the height of 

 eighty feet, with a diameter of three feet. It abounds, he 

 says, and indeed I have seen it with my own eyes, in the 

 English province of New Brunswick, the centre of which 

 lies about five hundred miles to the north of Boston^ in a 

 country covered with snow seven months in the year, 

 leaving us in no doubt at all with regard to its hardiness. 



132. This tree is frequently seen with a trunk undivided 

 by any limb to the amount of forty or fifty feet. It is 

 highly esteemed throughout the whole of the United 

 States. It is used in America for most of the purposes for 

 which our Ash is used here. A great deal of it is brought 

 to England in plank; and Michaux, in his North American 

 Sylva, says that Mr. Oddy, in his treatise on European 

 commerce, " acknowledges it to be superior, for many pur- 

 poses, to the Common European Ash.'^ 



133. If it were extremely difficult to obtain the seeds of 

 this tree, I should not press it upon my readers to plant it 

 in preference to the English Ash; because it is in hundreds 

 of thousands that it is wanted ; but nothing can be more 

 easy than to obtain the seed. The tree grows in our own 

 province of New Brunswick, and also in Canada. A ship- 

 load of seeds might be collected, with far less trouble than 

 a ship-load of many of those things which are really of no 

 use when they have been brought across the seas. 



134. There is this difference, this remarkable difference, 

 between the American White Ash and our English Ash, 

 namely, that the latter will have, as w^e have seen above, 

 two years for its seed to come up in, and that the American 

 White Ash will suffer its seed to come up the first year, 

 with just as much ease as an onion or a radish seed. I have 



