Wenlock Edge: For most of the year the sallow tree is unremarkable. But about now it lights up with golden catkins – the childhood nature-table standard-bearers of spring
Even from a hundred metres away, the tree lit up electric yellow. Across a mossy field of quarry spoil visited by punctilious snipes and skittering rabbits, in a scrubby hedge above the drop to Mill Meadows and the brook, before the land rose to the wooded tops of Bradley Downs and a grey-blue sky above, the sallow glowed – the brightest thing in that landscape.
Closer and the sallow willow was full of flower. "Sallow" and "willow" have cognates in Germanic languages and origins in Old English salig, sahl, and Latin salix. Sometimes called goat willow because it was used as fodder for goats; sometimes called pussy willow because of its furry catkins; whatever it's called, this was its moment. For most of the year, sallow is an unremarkable, scrubby tree; vernacular, common and muted. But when it flowers it lights up with golden catkins which, like the sticky buds of horse chestnut and hazel catkins, are the childhood nature-table standard-bearers of spring. There is something irrepressibly childlike about pussy willow, and it's not just its reach into the imaginations of the young and memories of the not so young; it has a magnetic power over insects.
Even though the temperature had risen, there seemed to be few insects about: an odd troupe of midges dancing in warm air columns, an occasional bee and a small tortoiseshell butterfly not quite recovered from dreaming in the back of a shed. But standing under the willow flowers was to be immersed in the humming, buzzing, droning of literally hundreds: honeybees, bumblebees, drone flies, true flies. The tree was electrified by the golden light of pollen-laden catkins and also the sonic community of the insects which appeared conjured by them. This was the first sallow of the year and seemed a good omen which, during the Ides of March, may be one up for the common, vernacular and childish.