A nursery forced to destroy 50,000 ash trees after dieback fungal disease was found is considering taking legal action against the government for failing to block imports sooner.
Simon Ellis of Crowders in Lincolnshire says the disease was found in 15 trees in June but officials issued an order preventing the firm from taking action.
The disease has now been confirmed at 52 locations in England and Scotland.
Ministers say the import ban was brought in as soon as it was practical.
In the last six weeks, 100,000 ash trees have been destroyed and experts say it may be too late to stop the spread of the fungus.
Scientists say the infection in native trees has been caused by spores of a fungus - carried on the wind from mainland Europe. Once infected by the chalara fraxinea fungus, a tree cannot be cured.
'No compensation'A plant health order banning imports and the movement of ash trees came into force on 29 October.
Mr Ellis, who is considering suing the government for £200,000, said by the time his firm was permitted to destroy its trees, many more had become infected.
He says the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) wrote to ministers in 2009 warning of a new strain of ash dieback disease and urged it to close UK borders.
He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "They should have taken it seriously at the time. They chose not to and now we have this really dramatic situation.
"Start Quote
End Quote DefraAt a time when our trees face increasing threat from a range of diseases, and in a tight financial climate, we believe that resources are best spent on surveillance"
"Effectively our income stream starts now, this is the season, this is our harvest time so to cut off our income stream - what other course of action can we take?"
The HTA says the government misdiagnosed the disease when it first alerted officials - the fungus was thought to be the same as one already widespread in the UK.
The HTA's Tim Briercliffe said: "We saw the disease, we saw what it was doing in Denmark. It wasn't doing that in the UK. Whatever the details of the science were saying, that surely was going to speak far louder."
Martin Ward, the UK's chief plant health officer with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said ash dieback disease was not spreading but acknowledged that "we're probably not going eradicate it".
"We have stopped the movement of plants and the sporulation on the leaf litter, which can lead to aerial spread, doesn't happen until the summer," he said.
"The increasing number of cases we are recording at the moment is the result of greater information, more knowledge of the distribution of the disease."
He told Today when the disease was identified in nursery stock in March this year the "important thing then was to track down that... stock, to destroy these isolated findings in recent plantings".
Defra then worked on identifying the "right measures" to be taken before the start of the planting season.
The government has ruled out paying compensation.
A spokesman for Defra said: "Hundreds of staff members from government agencies have been investigating sites across the UK.
"They have examined around 2,500 blocks of land, each 10 kilometres square, where mature ash trees are known to be present, in order to seek out traces of the disease in our established trees.
"At a time when our trees face increasing threat from a range of diseases, and in a tight financial climate, we believe that resources are best spent on surveillance and trying to tackle the disease."
Smart gadgetMinisters are concerned the fungus could be present on fallen leaves and spread by the boots of walkers or by pet dogs and are asking people to take precautions.
Symptoms of chalara dieback
- Diseased saplings typically display dead tops and side shoots.
- Lesions often found at base of dead side shoots.
- Lesions on branch or stem can cause wilting of foliage above.
- Disease affects mature trees by killing off new growth.
Thousands of ash trees across Britain were inspected over the weekend, and experts say they expect the full results of the survey by Wednesday.
Defra says the fungus has been found at 18 nurseries that had imported infected plants; 20 plantations which had received young trees, and in East Anglia in 14 wild ash trees, suspected of being infected by fungus spores carried on the wind.
It has been found at sites including a car park in Leicester; a forest near Glasgow and a college campus in South Yorkshire.
Next week Defra hope to have a new SmartCycler gadget to test for the disease - it will give a result in about an hour compared with the days it takes currently takes to send samples back to a laboratory.
Labour has accused the government of being to slow to act and queried whether cuts to the Forestry Commission's budget had affected the response.
But environment minister David Heath denied there had been any cutbacks "applied to plant health and tree health".
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