The young one and I planted some willow seeds recently. I was impressed to see yesterday that they had germinated in at most 6 days. (I wasn’t checking them everyday so I’m not sure exactly when they germinated.)
It’s thrilling to see these little leaves. I want to say “new life”, but I shouldn’t forget that each seed that sprouted here was already alive.
(At least a couple things I’m doing wrong: we shouldn’t have the container on the ground since it’s more likely to pick up pathogens, and we shouldn’t be growing directly in potting mix… but it’s probably good enough for my use case.)
For reference, the squares have width/height around 1.5 inches. So, the sprouts are teeny. But they’re still large compared to the seeds.
I think these might be from a red willow (Salix laevigata). The mommy tree had reddish twigs at least:
It’s still amazing to me how seeds so small they float on the wind with a bit of fluff can grow into something upwards of 50 feet tall. (And other plants take this to even bigger extremes, of course.)
It’s also amazing how many moths and butterflies are hosted by willows. At least per Calscape, all of the top ten species by number of caterpillar species hosted across their range are willows.
I think the arroyo willow (Salix lasiolepis) that I got from Down by the Bay nursery is still looking pretty happy in a wet pot. It supports up to 224 species of caterpillars (though I haven’t seen a single one on this one yet) and red willow (Salix laevigata) may support up to 218.
But, hm, I notice my arroyo willow has got red stems also so now I’m even less confident in my ID of “red willow”. On the other hand, comparing the Jepson pages for red willow (Salix laevigata) vs arroyo willow (Salix lasiolepsis), one difference I notice is that Salix laevigata seems to have longer catkins. I think the ones I saw were on the longer side.
Also, from Jepson, I see that arroyo willow (Salix lasiolepsis) gets 38 chromosomes from each parent vs 19 from each parent for red willow (Salix laevigata). So, each pair of Salix lasiolepsis can produce up to 2^76 =75,557,863,725,914,323,419,136 (~7.6×10^22) genetically distinct offspring, each parent choosing one from each of its pairs of chromosomes, vs the paltry 2^46 = 70,368,744,177,664 (~7.0×10^13) for a typical pair of humans.
And to try to learn some Latin: “Salix” just means “willow” in Latin, apparently. Per this page for an unrelated plant, “laevigata” means smooth. And this page on arroyo willows tells me that “lasiolepsis” “is derived from the two Latin words lasios, meaning shaggy, wooly hair and lepsis, which means scale or shell.” So, a red willow is a “smooth willow” (Salix laevigata) and an arroyo willow is a “woolly scaled willow” (Salix lasiolepis)? (I think I might remember that “salix” just means “willow” at least.)
(I release theses photos into the public domain. These works are marked with CC0 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.)
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