Freixos

Common Name: Freixo-comum

Scientific Name: Fraxinus angustifolia

Family: Oleáceas

Order: Fraxinus.

Features:

•It’s a medium size tree that can reach 25m height, with deciduous leaves. It’s a branchy tree, with an open and irregular silhouette.

•Its trunk is thick creating a lush and big pantry. Its bark is smooth, with a light gray colour, that becomes darker and older over the time.

• The leaves have a light green colour, made with 5-13 folioles with the shape of a spear.

•Flowers are in pending clusters that appear before leaves. It’s a hermafrodit tree.

•The fruit name is samara. Little seeds that are envolved by a skin which help them to be transported by wind.

Location:

All europe specially in south and eastern countries, but they are rare in hot locations.

Habitat:•It grows in wet and deep soils, without too much dryness and heat.

•Never grows above 1500m and it dosen’t stand a frost whose protection method is to develop flowers before the winter time.

•It grows near water sources, specially rivers, it doesn’t form (“villages”)

Utilization by man:•It offers an excellent wood, used in furniture, wooden tools, skis, stairs…

•Long roots keep the soils safe against erosion.

•It’s used mainly to feed cattle.

•In medicine it’s used to cure bone deseases, it is good to cure wounds and to lower body temperature in case of fever.

Funny Facts:•Cattle breeders say that animals never get sick if they are feed with Freixo.

•Druidic cultures gave mystic powers to Freixo, specially the ability to make rain. It’s one of the 16 trees in the celtic callendar.

•The most famous Freixo of Portugal was in Trancoso (the tree was destroied in 1941). It was the largest in europe in the mid XX. In the local legend, it was the tree were D. Dinis waited for D. Isabella of Aragon.