The love-lorn among the characters in the operas written by Sir W. S. Gilbert plentifully carry on the old tradition, and from Archibald Grosvenor (“The All-Right”) and Patience, in the duet “Hey, Willow-waly O!” to Teresa, in The Mountebanks, who sings, “Willow, willow, where’s my love?” they frequently apostrophise this tearful tree. Nay, even in the Bab Ballads we read of a troubadour whose refrain was “Willow, willow, o’er the lea,” and who maintained it with such pertinacity that it is at last rightly described as “his aggravating willow.”
No one can pretend that a freshly-pollarded willow is a beautiful object, as it stands up, naked, by the riverside, shorn of all its branches, and resembling nothing but some rude gigantic club with fist-like, knuckly head, whence those branches have been ruthlessly cut away. Even after two or three seasons, when those branches have been allowed to grow again and to present a more or less mop-like head of foliage, the pollarded willows look whimsically like so many Shockheaded Peters, after the style of the familiar Struwelpeter German toy-book. Not beautiful, and not perhaps ugly, they are the grotesque comedians of the riverside scenery.
The willow is what scientists and arboriculturists might—and possibly do—style an “economic” tree; that is to say, it has commercially useful features. Its bark is an excellent medicine for ague, and useful for tanning, although oak-bark is better. The ancient Britons wove their light boats, their “coracles,” from willow-wands, and cricket-bats are now made from its wood. Thus descriptive writers upon cricket-matches, thinking to be picturesque, are frequently found using the vicious phrase “wielders of the willow,” when in fact they mean batsmen. Many varieties of coarse baskets are now manufactured from willow branches. Hence the assiduous pollarding of the willow about once every seventh year, in the middle of winter.
Even the familiar osiers of the Thames have some of these economic uses, and the osiers themselves are a variety of willow.
“By the rushy fringèd bank,
Where grows the willow and the osier dank,”
says Milton, illustrating, in his Comus, the almost inevitable companionship of these leafy cousins.
If we wished most strikingly and picturesquely to describe the difference between an osier and a willow, we should say that an osier was a willow without a trunk. The osiers grow in beds, as a dense array of upright rods, and, to the uninitiated, there is but one kind of osier, but experts are said to be able to distinguish three hundred varieties. Experts are wondrous folk. Strange to say, although we associate osiers with watery flats and soggy patches of ground, the “hams,” or “holts,” as the osier-beds are generally styled, must, if it is desired to grow a good crop, by no means be saturated with water. To successfully form an osier-plantation, the land must be well trenched or otherwise drained of all stagnant or surplus water. Basket-willows refuse to thrive in land that is awash, and they require the sustenance of good manure. Weeds, too, hinder their growth, and they are susceptible to attacks from fly.
All these particulars doubtless come as surprising information to those whose life on the Thames consists merely of rowing, sailing, or camping. If they notice the numerous osier-beds at all, it is only to wonder idly at the dense thickets of tall straight rods they form; and it is but rarely suspected, either that they are carefully planted and tended, or that the crop of rods is both valuable and precarious.
An osier-bed is formed by planting cuttings of some six inches in length. Like cuttings from its big brother, the willow, they strike easily, and soon form vigorous plants. Indeed, in the case of green poles and posts made of willow, many worthy housewives have frequently been astonished at finding the posts they use for hanging out the domestic washing budding lustily and becoming healthy trees.