Ash

I have a book entitled Red Oaks & Black Birches: The Science and Lore of Trees by Rebecca Rupp. It is full of all kinds of information about various trees. Some of it it useful, some of it is trivial, some of it apocryphal, but all of it is interesting. And, since all the base and most of the top of my bench will be made of ash, I thought I would pass along some of the more interesting tidbits about it:

- Hank Aaron hit his 755th home run with an ash bat
- Beowulf and King Arthur toted ash spears
- A cord of white ash delivers about 20 million BTUs of heat; or the equivalent of 204 gallons of no. 2 fuel oil
- Ash is a member of the Olive family, Oleaceae, which includes the olive, privet, jasmine, forsythia, and lilac
- The original ash in Norse legend was Yggdrasil, the Tree of the World; Odin the one-eyed king of the gods created the first man from an ash tree and named his "Ask" (the first woman was made from an alder which is a birch)
- In Works and Days, Hesiod describes how Zeus created the third generation of men from a collection of ash spears
- The Algonquian Indians believed that humankind began when the Creator shot an arrow into the heart of an ash tree. Human beings, both male and female, then emerged
- Black ash, or hoop ash, splints were used to make barrel hoops, chair bottoms, woven mats, eel traps, fishing creels, baskets, and animal muzzles.