Wearing the green willow

Of all the sylvan gifts we enjoy, Ian Morton finds that the moisture-loving willow tree has arguably bestowed the most to Mankind throughout history

- Ian Morton

RANK by rank they go, forward and back, wheeling and turning and lining up again, their precision defined by their black bearskins. No matter how the sun beats down, their lines do not falter. We wonder how they fare under that tall, traditional headgear, but the guardsman’s bearskin, officially a ‘cap’, is mercifully not as weighty and ungainly as it appears. The covering, black skin from a Canadian bear culled to control numbers, is stretched over a lightweight frame woven from Somerset willow—3,500 acres of the Levels are devoted to the moisture-loving trees. The cap weighs only 1½lb.

There are willows and willows. Botanical observation over the centuries added steadily to the family members. Pliny described eight varieties as ‘among the most aquatic of trees’, the white willow salix alba furnishing long props to support Roman vines and bark strips for binding shoots. In his Synopsis Methodica of 1660, the scholar John Ray noted 10 species growing near Cambridge and the 1724 edition of his work supplied Carl Linnaeus with material for his 1737 classification of 19 willows. The number rose to 31 in his 1753 revision, although he made a mistake on the way. Encountering a new variety with dramatically drooping branches in a garden in The Netherlands in 1736, he took a lead from Psalm 137 that relates how the exiled Israelites sat down and wept by the waters of Babylon, hanging their harps on the willows there. Linneaus, therefore, classified the ‘weeping willow’ as Salix babylonica, unaware that the drooping trees along the Euphrates were actually poplars.