As is true of many farms in Wales, our land has an abundance of ash trees.

I have always been impressed by the vitality and resilience of the ash, a species that sheds its seed freely and a reason why in Wales it is as abundant as the sycamore.

It’s always distressing when landscape-enhancing trees come down or die but sadly many of our once vigorous and healthy ash now look very sick, their stark, white and leafless trunks weakened by ash dieback.

The fungus attacks the tree through its leaves, moving inside young shoots and preventing nutrients from being taken up from the earth or sugars via photosynthesis.

The first sign of infection is when the leaves start to wither, then the stem turns brown.

The disease is already changing the farming landscape, with gaps appearing where trees once towered.

There is a sad sense of inevitability that this transformation will only gather pace as more trees succumb since around 80 per cent of ash in infected areas are likely to die.

With so many trees ravaged by this disease, the cost of removing them is potentially staggering.

While the public sector will bear the cost of felling in public spaces, farmers and other private landowners with diseased ash on roadside boundaries will have to foot the bill for their removal at a time when the sector is already under cost of production pressures.

The presence of trees can often set the entire tone of a landscape, something we perhaps don’t notice until a tree dies or is removed.

If like me you are over the age of 45 you will likely remember the devastation wreaked on elms in the Seventies by Dutch Elm disease, and the spaces left in field margins and hedgerows by the felled and rotting trees.

The English elm was a very common sight in Wales, but in just two decades disease changed a landscape that had taken centuries to create.

Ironically it was the ash which largely recolonised the spaces left behind.

We can only hope that the species that has been such a great survivor on our shores for millennia, will somehow survive this challenge.