Strip the willow

SOME mornings I sit and marvel at the genius of William Morris. Our downstairs lavatory is screened from prying eyes by a panel of leaded lights made from hand-cast and painted Morris & Co glass in about 1887. Sunlight treacles through the bubbles and the painted willow wands. Willows are to us what olive trees are to southern Europeans, I would suggest, from time immemorial our most prolific and most useful crop. The osier beds must have been Morris's muse, living at Kelmscott in the west Oxfordshire flatlands on the upper reaches of the Thames: withy beds characterised the Thames valley for the manufacture of all things packaging. Before he designed Willow Bough, his most celebrated wallpaper, Morris mused in poetry of 'the happy willow tree, with the river by it sighing'.

- Isabel Bannerman

Willow's associations with the lovelorn were paramount. We had a cousin who would sing in his high falsetto Tit Willow from The Mikado (1885), making my mother cry. Yet Strip the Willow is the most joyfully dizzying of all the country dances. Oriental associations go way back, obvious in blue-and-white willow pattern china. In 1908, The Wind in the Willows captured the nation's heart and, in the 1990s, came the Whomping Willow, a violent-personality tree in Harry Potter.

Pollards and withy beds have shaped much of the southern landscape, especially the summer 'duvet softness' of my home world, the Somerset Levels, as described by Adam Nicolson. Here, in winter, there seems more light in the mercury waters of the rhynes than in the pewter skies above. Druidically, the 'wiligs' and 'saligs' of old English are the trees of intuition and enchantment, their elegy and all that is 'willowiness' in Hamlet... a willow grows 'aslant a brook' and 'shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream... pendent boughs... clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke'.

The usefulness of