I just bought a book of old Easter postcards, and thanks to my new obsession with flowers, I found that I was flipping through the images noticing what flowers were depicted. The stores in my neighborhood are filled with those white lilies which I think of as Easter lilies, but only one of the postcards shows Easter lilies. Two feature tulips, one a hyacinth, one some speedwells (or maybe they’re forget-me-nots) and two display pussy willows.
You can see them most prominently in the one above with the train but I
also like the card below with the pussy willows in a basket.
In parts of the world where palms are rare, pussy willows are the branches brought to church on Palm Sunday. And I also just learned about the Polish tradition called Dyngus Day (featured in my calendar http://www.schooloftheseasons.com/april.html): on the Monday after Easter the boys dump water on the girls and whip them with pussy willows. A fertility ritual, especially when one considers how profligate pussy willows are with their pollen. And why.
A few weeks ago on a windy morning, I was walking the dog around the block when a fluffy, yellow-tipped bundle, about the size and shape of a caterpillar, plopped onto the sidewalk at my feet. It made a splat as it sounded. I picked it up and carried it home where it dried into a flattish, cotton ball like lump.
I looked it up in my tree book and realized that these were catkins, that is the male flowers of certain tree families. The yellow color is the pollen which they are trying to spread via the wind. My specimen looked most like the catkins of the goat willow, also known as the pussy willow, so I went back the next morning.
Sure enough, the bu
ds on this particular tree are the soft velvety grey buds I think of as pussy willows. As they develop, they puff up with yellow bristles. These are pollen-covered anthers. I don’t understand the mechanism which makes them drop off the tree (perhaps they want to be blown by the wind into the arms of a female willow). In pussy willows, the sexes are on different trees, so this is a male tree (searching for its mate). Like all wind-pollinated plants (grasses are the same), pussy willows have to produce a lot of pollen to make sure they are spread around enough to find a receptive partner.
Once my specimens had dried, I can still see the little node where the bud once joined the stem. It is fuzzy and fun to pet, and you can see the silky, grey cat-like fur, for which the pussy willow is named, underneath the yellow tips.
The goat willow (salix caprea) is so named because the earliest known engraving of this plant shows a goat eating it. The tree has lots of suckers and the one at the end of the block exemplifies this tendency. It has many sprouts about three to four feet long around its trunk. The bark is a pale grey in color. My tree book says in the open they grow into upright shrubs but on edges they turn into crooked-stemmed trees. Mine is in-between, bigger than a shrub, scrubbier than a tree. The tree book also notes it “springs up rapidly on disturbed soil from seeds blown far with their fluffy coats.” Perhaps the rain in Seattle makes the coats sodden and thus they don’t get quite so far.
also like the card below with the pussy willows in a basket.In parts of the world where palms are rare, pussy willows are the branches brought to church on Palm Sunday. And I also just learned about the Polish tradition called Dyngus Day (featured in my calendar http://www.schooloftheseasons.com/april.html): on the Monday after Easter the boys dump water on the girls and whip them with pussy willows. A fertility ritual, especially when one considers how profligate pussy willows are with their pollen. And why.
A few weeks ago on a windy morning, I was walking the dog around the block when a fluffy, yellow-tipped bundle, about the size and shape of a caterpillar, plopped onto the sidewalk at my feet. It made a splat as it sounded. I picked it up and carried it home where it dried into a flattish, cotton ball like lump.
I looked it up in my tree book and realized that these were catkins, that is the male flowers of certain tree families. The yellow color is the pollen which they are trying to spread via the wind. My specimen looked most like the catkins of the goat willow, also known as the pussy willow, so I went back the next morning.
Sure enough, the bu
ds on this particular tree are the soft velvety grey buds I think of as pussy willows. As they develop, they puff up with yellow bristles. These are pollen-covered anthers. I don’t understand the mechanism which makes them drop off the tree (perhaps they want to be blown by the wind into the arms of a female willow). In pussy willows, the sexes are on different trees, so this is a male tree (searching for its mate). Like all wind-pollinated plants (grasses are the same), pussy willows have to produce a lot of pollen to make sure they are spread around enough to find a receptive partner.Once my specimens had dried, I can still see the little node where the bud once joined the stem. It is fuzzy and fun to pet, and you can see the silky, grey cat-like fur, for which the pussy willow is named, underneath the yellow tips.
The goat willow (salix caprea) is so named because the earliest known engraving of this plant shows a goat eating it. The tree has lots of suckers and the one at the end of the block exemplifies this tendency. It has many sprouts about three to four feet long around its trunk. The bark is a pale grey in color. My tree book says in the open they grow into upright shrubs but on edges they turn into crooked-stemmed trees. Mine is in-between, bigger than a shrub, scrubbier than a tree. The tree book also notes it “springs up rapidly on disturbed soil from seeds blown far with their fluffy coats.” Perhaps the rain in Seattle makes the coats sodden and thus they don’t get quite so far.
Here’s a photograph of the sidewalk in front of the tree, littered with spent catkins. Since I’ve never seen another pussy willow in the neighborhood, I’m not sure the longing of this tree is ever satisfied.
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