Tree of the Week: Weeping Willow

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The Weeping Willow -- Salix babylonica

I find few sights as satisfying as a mature weeping willow at water’s edge, especially when backed by a few tall conifers or broad-leafed trees. Our predecessors fell in love with this graceful North Chinese tree wherever it took up residence during its thousand-year journey along the silk trading routes. A Mr. Vernon, an Aleppo merchant, brought it to London from the Middle East in 1784. The popular tree came to symbolize grief, joy and forsaken love. Still enchanted by its iconic shape, we keep on planting the weeping willow and disregard its brittle branches, 30 year short life span, incessant thirst, invasive, sewer line attacking roots, continual leaf litter and susceptibility to cankers, blight, fungi, caterpillars, aphids, borers and spider mites.

Fast growing to 30 feet to 50 feet tall, the weeping willow develops a broadly irregular weeping crown with feathery branches. Trunk is normally short, with irregularly furrowed, grayish brown bark. Narrow lance shaped leaves, 3-6 inches long, 1/2 inch wide, yellow-green above, milky green below, hang down from long, graceful, pendulous rope-like twigs; they turn yellow before dropping in fall. Spring flowers are one-inch long, upright, fuzzy, yellowish catkins, usually growing on either male or female only trees; they are followed by valve shaped brown seed capsules. The tree wants full sun and moist soil; some willow roots can actually grow in water.

Nurseries usually sell hybrids between Salix babylonica and S. alba or fragilis, which are better adapted to the more humid climates of America and Europe; corkscrew leaf varieties are available. Bark and leaves provided medicines; baskets were made from its branches. Linnaeus established the species name ‘babylonica’ in the belief that these were the willows upon which the exiled Hebrews in sadness had hung their harps, see Psalm 137. But the biblical word ‘willow’ also included other waterside trees, and the referenced trees instead may have been a poplar species, Populus euphratica. Regardless, some of our most beautiful music is based on this weeping willow concept, including the heart-rending ‘Va pensiero’ from the Hebrew slave chorus in Giuseppi Verdi’s opera ‘Nabucco.’

-- Pieter Severynen

Thoughts? Comments?