The Bay-leaved Willow (_Salix pentandra_) is met with either as a small upright tree about twenty feet high, or as a shrub eight feet high. Its oval or elliptical leaves are rich green, smooth and sticky on the upper surface, and give out a pleasant fragrance like those of the Bay-tree; they vary from an inch to four inches long, and they may or may not bear stipules, but if these are present they will be egg-shaped or oblong. The stamens are normally five in each flower, but they vary up to twelve. This is reputed to be of all our Willows the latest to flower. A line drawn through York, Worcester, and North Wales will give roughly its southward range as a native species. South of that line it has been planted; north of it to the Scottish border it is a native. It has been found growing at a height of 1300 feet in Northumberland.
[Illustration: _Pl. 68._ Bay-leaved Willow--summer.]
[Illustration: _Pl. 69._ Bay-leaved Willow--winter.]
[Illustration: _Pl. 70._ Bole of Bay-leaved Willow.]
The Sallow (_Salix caprea_) is the only other species that can properly be considered as a tree, as it attains to a height of thirty feet, though fifteen to twenty feet is a more common measurement. Its usually egg-shaped leaves vary from almost round to elliptical or lance-shaped, and from two to four inches in length. In the typical form, which occurs chiefly in woods, dry pastures, and hedgerows, they are broad, smooth, and dull-green above, covered with soft white down beneath; the stipules half-kidney-shaped. This is the earliest of all our Willows to flower, and the gold (male) and silver (female) catkins are put out before the leaves. In the country, within a few miles of the larger cities, this can hardly be a desirable species to plant, for on the Sunday before Easter thousands who at no other period exhibit any strong religious tendency journey out to pick some "Palm," as they designate the Sallow bloom, and the rough pruning the Sallows then get must in many cases be disastrous. He who imagines that insect life is suspended until spring is on the verge of summer should visit the woods when the Sallow is in bloom; he will be astonished at the swarms of bees and moths that are collecting the abundant pollen or sipping the nectar provided for them. Before the bright catkins can be seen the locality of the tree may be known by the loud hum produced by hundreds of pairs of wings. The all but invariable rule among the Willows--as among Oaks, Beech, Birch, Hazel, and Pines--is to depend upon the wind for the transfer of pollen from one tree to the stigmas of another of the same species, but in the Sallow we find a breaking away from what was doubtless the primitive arrangement in all flowering plants, by the bribing with honey of more reliable and less wasteful winged carriers.