February 2012

       It is hard to tell in the Pacific Northwest when autumn ends and spring begins. Winter is a rather blurry season in between. Especially this year which has been incredibly mild except for the third week of January when we got slammed with repeated snow, rain, freezing rain and more snow. The damage was incredible to trees and over 200,00 people were out of power for days. I would be easy to consider that week our winter, since it’s been mild and green ever since.
These sort-of-winters have been perplexing this former Wisconsinite for 23 years. This year is no different. On New Year’s Day the witch hazels, sasanqua camellias and Higan cherries were already in bloom. Were these the first flowers of spring? Or the last of autumn’s? Though we refer to them as winter-bloomers, and they certainly were blooming between winter solstice and spring equinox, I can’t help but think of them as the flowers that bind autumn to spring here, in this strange season that floats over winter with a  green amorphous grace.
So what then are the first flowers of spring? Already I’ve seen daffodils and crocus in bloom, swelling buds on flowering plums and magnolias. Back in my Wisconsin days I would have been warbling like a robin about imminent spring if I had seen these flowers. Here they just seem like one more aspect of this seasonal blur.
Yet there are flowers that makes me chirp, “It’s spring!” and they are willow catkins. Those polleny, petal-less willow flowers never fail to wake spring in my heart. But then again I have a fondness for willows that borders on obsession at times.
Shortly after I received my botany degree some umpteen years ago, I began my own gardening business. I had called it Salix-Handmade Gardens. I had hoped to save the Latin name for willow for my first son, or at least the greyhound puppy I dreamed of getting. But impatient for either of those beings to manifest I christened my new business with it instead.
It’s been over 25 years since that fledgling gardener plastered Webster Groves, Missouri with fliers announcing his services. There have been countless moves and manifestations of Salix since, and though I don’t use the name professionally anymore, my love of the genus Salix and everything willowy about the world lives on. It is not coincidental that I landed in a swamp. We have 3 native willows growing on the fringes of our damp property, not to mention the 10 or so Michael and I have planted. I even have a few alpine willow in pots. Like this S. nakamurana var. yezo-alpina.

What is it you might ask that has drawn me to this genus of trees over all others. I ask myself, too, because I love oaks and cherries, maples and katsuras, too. Still willows, gangly, often weedy willows, more moody than nobile, often denizens of the muckier parts of the world, have captivated me for nearly half a century. From our neighbor’s weeping willow, on which I swung ape-like as a boy to my most recent plant acquisition  the pink S. chaenomeloides ‘Mt. Asama’ (pictured below) my affections for willows has lasted. I think it can be wrapped up in the 3 words Christopher Newsholme, holder on the Official National Collection of Willows in the United Kingdom and author of the definitive book: WILLOWS: The Genus Salix, uses. He describes the 3 virtues of willow wood as “flexibility, durability and lightness.”  What better way to approach life I might add. So willows have remained not only a obsession, but a totem for me over the years.

Willows, as one of the earliest recorded—primarily from pollen fossils—pre-Ice Age flowering plants, were at one time the dominant flowering plant on the planet. Though the genus is concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere there are species as far south as Argentina and isolated river bank populations in North Africa. Willows introduced to Australia for use in basket making among other things, have become thuggish invasives taking over wetlands with vigor. There are species that hug coasts and river bottoms like the Northwest native S. scouleriana (pictured at the opening of this post), tropical and subtropical species that tolerate no frost, as well as arctic and alpine willows that spend 3 quarters of the year under snow.

If I were to further Mr. Newsholme’s assessment of the virtues of willows I would whittle it down to one word: fluidity.  A fluidity of distribution, as well as form. Their pension for the wetter places of the world attests to this fluidity as well. Their long association with deep emotions, dreaming and intuition, the moon and water and the feminine, all speaks to this fluidity, too. The ancient Celts associated it with Brigid, the maiden aspect of the triple goddess and the bringer of spring, whose festival, Imbolc, is celebrated as Candlemas on February 2nd, the mid point between winter solstice and spring equinox, traditionally believed to be a the beginning of spring. So, maybe my enduring love of willows as harbingers of spring is not my own, but something historical, maybe even primordial.

Certainly as they creep out from the swamp around our small farm they create an impenetrable tangle like some prehistoric quagmire. But I also garden with willows. In mixed borders I coppice S. integra ‘Hakuro-nishiki’, the Japanese dappled willow, and S. elaeagnos, the rosemary willow, for their beautiful foliage which compliments perennials beautifully. I also coppice S. alba var. vitellina, the white willow (pictured below), for its brilliant golden twigs, better than any dogwood.  

I have yet to become a basket weaver, but it seems almost as imminent as spring as I age. Certainly it would be one more way to connect with willow, especially now while I’m waiting for those pollen-acious flowers and spring to break out. But it is not only those flowers that I wait for but the lush first flush of chartreuse foliage after the flowers are spent and the rapid grow that ensues. You see I am not only waiting for spring, I’m waiting for summer, too.