European Ash Fraxinus excelsior
European Ash is an introduced perennial tree, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 76 ft.
More about this plant
Fraxinus excelsior, known as the ash, or European ash or common ash to distinguish it from other types of ash, is a flowering plant species in the olive family Oleaceae. It is native throughout mainland Europe east to the Caucasus and Alborz mountains, and west to Great Britain and Ireland, the latter determining its western boundary. The northernmost location is in the Trondheimsfjord region of Norway. The species is widely cultivated and reportedly naturalised in New Zealand and in scattered locales in the United States and Canada. The wood has many uses as it is flexible, workable, strong and lightweight. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Drought tolerance
- Moderate
- Shade tolerance
- Moderate
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Moderate waterlogging
- Height
- 76 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 35 ft wide open-grown · ~35 ft in the wild
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~149 caterpillar species
Fraxinus supports ~149 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Fraxinus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting European Ash :
Wildlife & visitors 6 birds · 2 mammals · 5 nectaring
Open records of who else uses European Ash — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 6 birds and 2 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
+ 2 more species → ↑ show fewer
5 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Fraxinus →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (27) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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