Wonder At The Willow

This adaptable tree is a vital part of many Scottish ecosystems.

- Jim Crumley

FOUR thousand feet up on BraighRiabhach where the Wells of Dee gurgle miraculously out of the mountain’s unguessable granite innards to embrace the over world of the Cairngorms plateau, one of the first signs of life it encounters is a squirming mat of leaves about half-an-inch high.

Very little of what lives up here is as it seems: it’s a willow tree.

Lower by 3900 feet and 100 miles further south, its roots sunk in the edge of an overgrown pond in a Stirling woodland, is one of the handsomest willow trees you will ever see. Once about 80 feet high, it now leans east, propped up at a rakish angle by the most securely anchored and robust of all Scotland’s bog-dwellers – an alder tree.

Alders love water. The crannog builders knew that 3000 years ago, which is why they built their water-borne homes on piles made from alder trunks. By comparison, keeping an elegant willow tree aloft is child’s play.

In very different ways, these two extremes of willow habitat are central to my life.The first is what I think of as the Scottish landscape at its utmost. If you grew up in Dundee and found your way to the mountains by way of a years-long apprenticeship – the Sidlaws, the Angus Glens, the sky-tending highway of Jock’s Road – then the Cairngorms will always represent the ultimate landscape, the spread eagled temptress on your northern horizon.

When I reached the plateau of Braigh Riabhach for the first time, with its summer snowfields and the Wells of Dee, the half-inch-high willows and the disappearing trick of the dotterel, it seemed a place of miracles. To the nature writer I have since become, it is as near to heaven on earth as makes no difference. And it is still a place of miracles.