Cankered Ash

Cankered Ash is a beautiful wood. Ash is so often beautiful anyway but Cankered Ash is wonderful. It has all the sorts of things I really enjoy with wood. It is unpredictable and moves after it has been turned – even if it is turned quite dry but especially if it is turned fresh. There must be a lot of stresses in it. It often has a particularly good colour and sheen to it, rich and deep. And, of course, it also has holes in it! Quite why they are appealing I don’t know but it isn’t only me. It seems that the more holes there are in a piece of wood the quicker it sells.

The most expensive bowl I have sold was a Cankered Ash bowl. It was £150. It was a very large bowl and had to be this price but it still seems like a lot of money to me, though I see plenty of wooden turned bowls on the internet for more. Anyway, I put it in a local gallery and went into the gallery about a week later. I couldn’t see the bowl and wondered what they’d done with it. I thought maybe due to its size it had to be moved. It just never occured to me that it had been snatched up within days but that was the case.

I have recently been turning some more Cankered Ash. When I came to photograph the bowl I just didn’t seem able to do it justice so I took a video. As soon as I’d started doing that I realised I could also show people who didn’t know what Cankered Ash looked like as I have an Ash tree in the garden which has Canker. So I have a video on Youtube about my latest Cankered Ash bowl.