Ashes to ashes

The familiar winter silhouette of the ash tree with its elegantly drooping  lower branches, upper ones reaching for the sky, will soon be a memory if ash dieback disease proves to be as  catastrophic  as predicted. It has wiped out 90% of the species in Denmark and threatens to do the same here. Although ash trees make up only 5% of British trees as a whole here in West Wales it predominates in the windswept landscape and without it the countryside will look very denuded. 
There will be no shortage of firewood though.

Gerard Manley Hopkins in happier times

Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,
Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep
Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.
Say it is ashboughs: whether on a December day and furled
Fast or they in clammyish lashtender combs creep
Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high.
They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep
The smouldering enormous winter welkin! May
Mells blue and snowwhite through them, a fringe and fray
Of greenery: it is old earth’s groping towards the steep
Heaven whom she childs us by.