It is native throughout mainland Europe[2] east to the Caucasus and Alborz mountains, and west to Great Britain and Ireland, the latter determining its western boundary.

[3] The species is widely cultivated and reportedly naturalised in New Zealand and in scattered locales in the United States and Canada.

[citation needed] The fruit is a samara 2.5–4.5 cm (0.98–1.77 in) long and 5–8 mm (0.20–0.31 in) broad, often hanging in bunches through the winter;[8] they are often called 'ash keys'.

[2] It is also considered native in southwestern Asia from northern Turkey east to the Caucasus and Alborz mountains.

[3] The species is widely cultivated and reportedly naturalized in New Zealand and in scattered locales in the United States and Canada including Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Ontario, Ohio, Kentucky and British Columbia.

The most northerly ashwood in Britain is on limestone at Rassal, Wester Ross, latitude 57.4278 N.[14] Ash prefers moister soil types and is commonly limited by temperature and so not found at the higher colder altitudes in much of Europe, though in Iran, it may reach 2000 m asl.

[18] A common moth which causes the browning of ash leaves, as well as garden privet and lilac, is Gracillaria syringella.

The usually gregarious larvae form an epidermal gallery (i.e. feed within the leaf) which leads to a brown blotch with black frass.

A group at Queen Mary University of London led by Richard Buggs are sequencing the self-pollinated offspring of a tree from Worcestershire, held by the Earth Trust.

Until World War II, the trees were often coppiced on a 10-year cycle to provide a sustainable source of timber for fuel and poles for building and woodworking.

Ash is an important constituent of wood pasture, a European management system in which open woodland provided shelter and forage for grazing animals.

[12] Ash was coppiced and pollarded, often in hedgerows, and evidence in the form of some huge boles with multiple trunks emerging at head height can still be seen in parts of Britain.

Hurleys are manufactured from the butt log (bottom 1.5-m of the stem) and from trees ideally of a diameter at breast height around 25–30 cm.

Due to the lack of available ash in Ireland, over 75% of the timber needed to produce the 350,000 hurleys required for the game annually must be imported, mostly from Eastern European countries.

[34] In the 13th-century Edda and other writing relating to Norse mythology, the vast ash tree Yggdrasil ("the steed (gallows) of Odin"), watered by three magical springs, serves as axis mundi, sustaining the nine worlds of the cosmos in its roots and branches.