Our new landmark willow pollard is now providing us with lots of useful wood.
Not seasoned wood in the way that you’d make something with, living wood that we can use to make more willow trees.
More willow trees mean more life. As you’ve probably heard willows support a huge amount of life. So a huge number of willows multiplied by a huge increase in wildlife would be a satisfying outcome.
Now I know you know that willows grow easily. Get a willow twig, stick it in a jar of water and watch it send out roots.
They grow so easily that I was once involved in trying to suppress them on a nearby reserve. The reserve was sown with expensive wildflower seeds and willow kept growing where it wasn’t supposed to. They were shading out the things that were “supposed” to be there. Eventually the wildflower meadow was too expensive to maintain properly so the willow quickly grew into a woodland, which was what was supposed to be there. Nature often has different ideas to landscape architects. One of the reasons willow got established there was because at the time the willows set seed the ground was bare moist and warm. Few of the tiny fragile seeds survive after germinating and not many germinate. These conditions were ideal for them. Lots of interesting hybrids appeared.
“Vegetative propagation” describes another way of growing them. Just stick a bit of living willow into moist ground and voila, a tree will probably grow.
Anyway, I digress. We now have so much willow it’s almost overwhelming. How can we get all the twigs and branches from the newly pollarded tree put to use. It’s spring. The best time to plant them.
But it’s still flooded, which is exactly what we want. And we hope it will stay that way.
Imagine if this was flooded all year?
First job was to cut the willow into twigs branches and logs.
But working in the marsh in winter is a challenge. Being Marshians of course we adapt. Or buy hand waders
If you’ve ever worked with willow you’ll know that even these big branches will root. They’d make great dams!
And lo! Great dams they became
The following day a new posse of Marshians appeared and began sharing skills and knowledge
But little wellies weren’t up to the depth of water still flowing across the marsh. We were working in one of the shallowest spots.
So we sorted all the willow into twigs branches and logs
And carried them across the marsh
And piled them up on another dryish spot. The water between there and the spot we want to plant them is too deep still, even for wellies. We’ll go back when the levels drop a bit more and plant them out.
And we kept repeating our new mantra:
Imagine if this was flooded all year?
Rural Reading 