A small tree up to 30 or 35 ft high, with green shoots, free from down in all its parts. Leaves 4 to 12 in. long; leaflets stalked, usually nine or eleven, sometimes seven or thirteen, 1 to 3 in. long, 3⁄4 to 11⁄2 in. wide, tapered at the base, triangular toothed, pointed, dull green; rachis whitish beneath, with a broad, shallow groove above; stalks of the leaflets 1⁄4 to 1⁄2_in. long, except the terminal one, which is 3⁄4 to 1 in. long. Flowers as in the common ash and its allies. Fruits narrow-lanceolate, 11⁄4 to 2 in. long.
Native of Turkestan and other parts of W. Asia; introduced to Kew by way of the St Petersburg Botanic Garden in 1891. It is an elegant small tree, very rare in cultivation, but quite distinct among ashes with the same number of leaflets in these being conspicuously stalked, and, together with the young shoots, quite glabrous. The true species is not at present in the Kew collection (1971).
F. sogdiana varies in the size and shape of its leaflets. The plants called F. potamophila have the leaflets relatively broader than in F. sogdiana in the strict sense, but judging from material in the Kew Herbarium only one species is involved and F. potamophila is accordingly placed under F. sogdiana in synonymy, as it is in Flora SSSR.