Nursery makes ash dieback legal bid

Simon Ellis, managing director of Crowders Nurseries in Horncastle, Lincolnshire, said the Horticultural Trades Association wrote to ministers in 2009 warning of a new virulent strain of the ash dieback disease and calling on it to close UK borders.

He claims that if the government had acted sooner, the situation would not be so serious now.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has reported 52 confirmed cases of the disease. That number is expected to increase as the results come through from a mass survey of trees that has been carried out over the weekend.

The fungal disease is threatening to wipe out the majority of Britain’s ash trees. It has already killed up to 90 per cent of ash trees in some areas of Denmark.

Plant health experts have been undertaking an urgent survey of 1,000 sites which have had saplings from nurseries where the disease has been found to be present.

Read more: Q&A - ash dieback disease

Disease could be ‘catastrophic’

The government banned imports of ash trees last Monday after a programme that has seen 100,000 specimens destroyed since the disease was discovered in March.

But the discovery of the disease in mature trees in East Anglia has raised fears it has blown in to the UK as well as arriving on imports and will be hard to control.

Professor Michael Shaw, a plant disease expert from the University of Reading, said the impact could be “catastrophic”, warning it could wipe out 19 out of every 20 ash trees.

A spokesman for Defra said: “Hundreds of staff members from government agencies have been investigating sites across the UK for signs of the tree disease Chalara ash dieback this weekend.

“They have examined around 2,500 blocks of land, each 10 kilometres square, where mature ash trees are known to be present, in order to seek out traces of the disease in our established trees.

“At a time when our trees face increasing threat from a range of diseases, and in a tight financial climate, we believe that resources are best spent on surveillance and trying to tackle the disease.”