“What is all this juice and all this joy?/ A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning.”—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Some years in western Massachusetts, the snows of winter melt away in March, uncovering the earth, and early signs of life poke out of the thawing ground. If you look a little higher, additional hints of awakening are evident and free from the coverage of late snows. Members of three families, willows, witch hazels, and hazels, produce fascinating early flowers.
Willows consist of almost 300 species, ranging from large trees to ground-covering shrubs. By early spring, the weeping willows, Salix babylonia, are turning an encouraging shade of yellow green. Our native pussy willows, Salix discolor, grow in wetlands and their soft, fuzzy gray blossoms emerge during the first warm days of late winter. I always react with childlike glee when I notice the first pussy willows of the season. Botanically these blooms are termed “catkins’’ from the Old Dutch word “kattleens” meaning “kitten’s tail.” Catkins are the single-sex flowers produced on many plants. The male flowers are more prominent than the female. D.H. Lawrence, in Women in Love, writes about catkins in a passage that is part botany lesson and part sex education: “Do you know the little red ovary flowers…Those are the little seed-producing flowers and the long catkins, they produce pollen to fertilize them…From those little red bits, the nuts come; if they receive pollen from the long danglers. And now you will always see them, he said.”
Larger catkins are features of willows originating in Asia. The giant pussy willow, Salix chaenomeloides, has silvery white catkins, and the variety ‘Mount Asama’ has branches clad with light pink blooms. Salix gracilistyla melanostachys has black catkins. Depending on the light and maturity of the male blooms, they can appear like black velvet or, in direct sunlight, blackish red with more obvious red stamens. Like most willows, these bushes appreciate wet conditions where they will grow to twelve feet tall.
“Cutting branches of willows from the garden in midwinter to force indoors should be an annual ritual for anyone who gardens.”—Dan Hinkley
Catkins are also a feature of hazel bushes. Corylus avellane ‘contorta,’ the European corkscrew hazel, was discovered in 1863. In spring this hazel, also known as Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick, produces dangling catkins arrayed along twisting branches. A new cultivar, ‘red majestic,’ has dramatic ruby-colored catkins and bronze foliage.
The witch hazels, Hamamelis, were given their common name by English colonists who thought the shrubs had the shape of hazel bushes and observed Native Americans using the branches as divining rods to find underground water. The Anglo-Saxon word “wych,” meaning “to bend” eventually became “witch.”
Our native witch hazel, Hamamelis virginiana, is fall-blooming, with tiny yellow threads showing in October. An herbal astringent made from the plant’s roots, bark, and leaves, “witch hazel” is used for many types of skin care.
In 1928, a hybrid witch hazel was bred at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum by crossing two Asian witch hazels, the Chinese Hamamelis mollis and the Japanese Hamamelis japonica, to create Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Arnold’s promise.’ Thick clusters of rich yellow threadlike flowers are a promise of spring to come.
The Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium is responsible for the development of two other witch hazel cultivars: ‘Jelena’ has coppery orange blooms, while those of ‘Diane’ are a purply red. Both have the added features of a sweet fragrance and beautiful fall foliage. Many new cultivars are being introduced with shades of pink, red, and yellow. The flowers of witch hazels are not showy but the blooms, each consisting of four crinkled filaments, are worth observing up close. A cut stem forced inside is a good way to appreciate these intriguing flowers.
The old saying, “March comes in like a lion but goes out like a lamb” often doesn’t match the reality of March in New England. The lion may continue to roar all month long and the sheep may bleat in terror. But the earth is awakening, and these early courageous blooms will appear to mark the end of winter and the beginning of spring.
“Tentatively, shyly, like the first promise of very young love, the new year has begun.”—Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck.
March 2018
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