Alarming News

This has been widely discussed here. Where have you been?

 

You can come get some where I live. Wetlands filled with dead ash from the emerald ash-borer. Little ghost forests around every marsh. Different variety than the classic guitar choice though.

 

A friend sent me this article from Scientific American about Swamp Ash...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...d-roll-as-prized-guitar-wood-shortage-looms1/

 

That's a great article.

We lost a lot of bottomland hardwood forest to the "Soybean Epidemic" a number of decades ago and the Army Corps of Engineers messed up some of the other bottomland. Trees that are submerged most of the year tend to get stressed out, not to mention germination issues.

What we need are giant portable, gas fueled devices that can sterilize the logs, before they're transported anywhere. Inevitable or not, we don't need to speed the distribution of these hated borers.

 

Wood is wood .

 

Buy used.

 

Why is this alarming news?

 

Alarming? Not really. News? It would be fairer to call it history.

 

No, there's morning wood and then everything else…

 

Gather 'round and I'll tell you all about tonecomposites.

 

The 'tone chasers" need their guitars made from ash. They sound better when played through a chain of 12 stomp boxes led into an amp set on super crunch overdrive. Get it? It's all about da' tone.

 

Dutch Elm disease in the early 1900s from the Netherlands, Ash Blight (Emarald Ash Borer), 1990s from Russia and China, Zebra Muscles from Europe in the 1980s, and the list goes on. We have the know how and technology to minimize these issues if we'd just react more quickly. Heart breaking. Here in the Northeast everywhere you go there are fallen ash trees, hundreds of thousands of them by the sides of the roads. (A bit different than southern swamp ash but same family and affected by the same blight.)

 

You forgot the American Chestnut.
Very substantial loss as well.

 

Soon fender will be reclaiming old fender ash bodies to refinish them into new fenders....

 

Okay fine, looks like alder bodies for some of you...

 

If it lasts more than four hours........ brag to your friends.

 

I think Chestnut could've been a great build material for T bodies.

What's interesting to me is, there's still "Grow Back" Chestnut going on out there and I see it on daily walks from our door at The Cabin. The color of the leaves changes in a manner very similar to the American Beech. Some leaves still green, a few yellow, and quite a few a very pretty russet color.

These trees seldom make it to the stage where they blossom. That surely would have been an amazing thing, to see whole hillsides covered in Chestnut blossoms. Instead the treelike things make it to about 20 feet, then go into decline - then the whole process might start again.

Just as you see large unscathed American Elm trees out in the Pacific Northwest and down on plantations in South Louisiana, totally spared of Dutch Elm Disease, sometimes there ARE full sized American Chestnuts that are segregated from their usual ranges and somehow the vector never reached them. But it is customary not to tell outsiders what you may have seen. Like Spelunkers not telling just anyone where certain caves are to be found. Just as batches of ginseng are noticed but not mentioned to others - that it might rebound some.

The Internet lets information fly around so fast. Will there be places where large Ash trees survive and word of it stays submerged? Won't the cursed borers find them anyway?

 

Yep.
But it aint like it once was is it.

Theres a special cave in WV. Amazing experience.
Then too many people told too many people.

There are mature A.Chestnuts. But there were once vast forests of them a dozen states wide.
The amazing thing is the speed at which they vanished.