Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/362

332 above with regard to the identity of the tree still living, as undoubtedly no mere offshoot or sucker, but a part of the trunk of the old ash.

The ash has benefited physically by the storm that destroyed the largest part of it, and is now in a condition of comparative rejuvenescence. By a natural process known to every student of tree-life and to anyone conversant with practical forestry, the removal of the greater part—in this case more than two-thirds of its bulk—causes a greater amount of food to be available, frequently resulting in the throwing up of many suckers, which, clustering round the parent stem, more or less swiftly tend to hasten its decay. Happily in this instance the tree has utilised the larger store of nutriment, not for the growth of the more commonplace suckers, but for its own preservation. The trunk having drawn up into it the greater abundance of annually rising sap, has employed that sap by circulating it through the reduced number of branches to be fed, thus arresting decay and enabling the sturdy old fragment to support the graceful crown of leafage displayed in Plate V. In Plate VI. may be seen how this piece of vegetable economy has been accomplished. At the right-hand side is shown the conduit, or stem-like root, built up and developed by the ash out of its own tissues since 1875, and now acting as chief channel for the augmented flow of sap through the tree. Commencing at the top of the trunk where the main bough slopes off, the work while under construction by slow stages of growth, as is usual in vegetable engineering, was probably hidden away under cover; but the cover has been thrown off for years, and in its robust and forceful expansion the conduit has torn away a strip of bark from the trunk and stands out in the middle of its course, to disappear again into the body of the tree lower down. In fine, the Shrew Ash as shown in the plates presents a twofold study of remarkable interest. On the right hand, or, as I shall call it, the natural history side, it