A single twig from a parcel may explain England's weeping willows
The poet Alexander Pope, the story goes, begged a twig from the bundle binding a parcel sent from Spain to Lady Suffolk and planted it. It thrived, and legend says every weeping willow in England descends from it. The tale is plausible because broken willow branches root almost anywhere they land.
Salix holds around 350 species of mostly deciduous trees and shrubs, with more than 160 named hybrids, favouring damp soils in cold and temperate regions. Narrow-leaved shrubby kinds are called osiers and broad-leaved ones sallows. Size varies enormously: the arctic dwarf willow rarely tops 6 centimetres, creeping across the ground instead. The popular weeping willow is itself a cross between the Peking willow of China and Europe's white willow. The Latin name may come from Celtic words meaning near water.
Willows are among the first woody plants to leaf out and among the last to drop leaves. A few days reaching 10 degrees can coax out leaves and flowers as early as February, and they shed in autumn once daylight shrinks to roughly ten hours and 25 minutes. Male and female catkins grow on separate plants in every species but one. The tiny seeds ride wind and water yet stay viable only a few days. Fossils go back to the early Eocene in North America.
Their bark sap is rich in salicin, and texts from Sumer, Assyria and Egypt mention willow leaves and bark, as did Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. Which ancient prescriptions truly involved willow is often uncertain; a Sumerian tree called the haluppu could equally have been oak or poplar.
Beavers build dams with willow, bees rely on its early pollen, and more than a hundred aphid species feed on it. The Quinault of Washington twisted the bark into harpoon line, and other Native American peoples wove baskets and fish weirs from the shoots. Planted across southern Australia to stop riverbank erosion, willows became invasive and are now being replaced with native trees. Tokyo's Ginza district is famous for streets lined with them.
Source: Willow
