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Look to Willow Trees for Early Leafing, Grace, and Flexibility.
What is more graceful than a willow tree? A tree of long flexible branches that swirl around the center, swoop to the ground and up again. I have loved willows since childhood. My maternal grandparents had a lovely old weeping willow in their front yard, and it provided years of pleasure for us children. How pleasant to have a tree that invited us to play, its branches wandering down to child level instead of pointing unreachable to the sky. We loved to grab onto its long branches and try to swing across the yard. I still remember the feeling of the slender twigs scraping my palms and arms as I tried to cling and peeled the leaves from it as I lost my grip and fell in a heap, laughing. Then there were the fuzzy flowers called catkins, looking frightfully close to caterpillars, which we would pull off the tree to examine. The tree itself was rather messy and often deposited slender branches, dead leaves, and catkins on the grass beneath it, requiring frequent raking by my grandfather.
Willows have so many uses. It was staggering once I started researching it. The thin twigs were used as string to wrap parcels. According to legend Alexander Pope rooted then planted a twig that had been used in this way and succeeded in propagating the first weeping willow in England, from whence all the others are descended. Not sure if that is true, but…
