Fraxinus ornus
Fraxinus ornus, the manna ash or South European flowering ash, is a species of Fraxinus native to Southern Europe and Southwestern Asia, from Spain and Italy north to Austria and the Czech Republic, and east through the Balkans, Turkey, and western Syria to Lebanon and Armenia.
Description
Fraxinus ornus is a medium-sized deciduous tree growing to tall with a trunk up to 1 m diameter. The bark is dark grey, remaining smooth even on old trees.The buds are pale pinkish-brown to grey-brown, with a dense covering of short grey hairs.
The leaves are in opposite pairs, pinnate, long, with 5 to 9 leaflets; the leaflets are broad ovoid, long and broad, with a finely serrated and wavy margin, and short but distinct petiolules long; the autumn colour is variable, yellow to purplish.
The flowers are produced in dense panicles long after the new leaves appear in late spring, each flower with four slender creamy white petals long; they are pollinated by insects.
The fruit is a slender samara long, the seed broad and the wing broad, green ripening brown.
Cultivation and uses
Fraxinus ornus is frequently grown as an ornamental tree in Europe north of its native range for its decorative flowers—the species is also sometimes called "flowering ash". Some cultivated specimens are grafted on rootstocks of Fraxinus excelsior, with an often very conspicuous change in the bark at the graft line to the fissured bark of the rootstock species.A sugary extract from the sap may be obtained from the bark of the tree; which was compared to biblical manna in late medieval times, giving rise to the name of the tree in English, Spanish, and Italian. Likewise, the sugar alcohol mannitol derives its name from the extract.