Uses for willow?

How many uses for willow can you come up with?

The Joan Armatrading song? It's a good tune, I like it a lot, even though I'm not really a fan of her work. Heard it on the soundtrack to "Boys on the Side", gift from an old GF, and a great album.

Your post reminds me that 1 teaspoon of ground bark in a cup of water, left to infuse in cold water for at least 8 hours or in hot water to make a bitter "tea," is the historical origin of aspirin, with all its uses and cautions, such as headache.

Willow is wicker and the wands can be used for everything from baskets to wall construction.

The plants have been used for stabilizing stream banks.

Split wands are used for baskets.

Whole branches are used for furniture, garden plant protection, and woven together to make fences, trellises and fish traps.

Chopped and heated willow pieces make a kind of broth that is good for rooting plant cuttings in.

It's one of the plants used for natural treatment of greywater.

And I've 'heard' that if you plant the little fuzzy lumps, you'll get kittens. ;-)

Sue

Young willow twigs can be stripped of leaves and branches, then the bark peeled off like rolling down socks. The long bark tubes can then be braided or twisted for cordage that is relatively quick though not terrible strong or long-lasting.

Thin willow sticks with the bark shaved off to square up the ends make impromptu chopsticks.

I use fresh sticks of willow for roasting some food above campfire. I cut one stick, peel off most of the the bark using knife and sharpen the tip. Than I spike the food and hold it above the flames. Fresh willow doesn´t burn well and sticks are flexible which are desired features in this case.

WHISTLES!!

Dried willow as hearthboards for fire-staring with hand or bow drills.

Willow is also good at delivering Elora to Tir Asleen.
wait, what were we talking about?

Dried willow for fishing floats and surface lures; green willow for fishing poles.

I feel like I should mention a bit about different willows.
Black willow is a big tree. It and weeping willow are very much trees of wet ground.
If you are looking for water willows usually mean water at the surface or close to it.
Willows can also put their roots down a long way, especially in clay, so it is not entirely reliable.
A lot of animals eat willow. The catkins are a favoured food of grouse and related birds. deer and moose will graze the branches.
Black and weeping willows are a bit different in the wood. Weeping willow tends to snap easy, especially the thin branch tips that hang down. the solid wood of black willow is a wood that can take a beating without coming apart. It is not really hard or strong. It just resists coming apart from impacts.

Then there are the sandbar and other small willows. The wands are actually fairly tough.
If you kind of twist them they limber up and can be used to bind with. The twist is along the length.
I mean it is almost like you start to twist right handed like a string and then untwist it and try to twist it up left hand.
You don't want to weaken or snap them by twisting them all the way at once.
You need to work them a bit to loosen them up.
When you are finished you don't actually have any twist in it but now it is flexible enough that you can tie it in knots and bind other things together with it.
Withe is an old word for willow wands treated like this and used for making hurdles and wattle walls. Sometimes it is spelled with a y, wythe.

Hurdles are like sections of fence that can be lifted up and moved around. They were made by taking heavier sticks as uprights and weaving the wythes between them like basket work.

Wattle was an old way of building a shelter. If you drive stakes into the ground and weave withes through them like you were making a hurdle you now have something you can plaster.

Basket willow is usually grown by cutting a young willow off short and then harvesting the shoots that sprout up around the stump.

Willow also makes a very fine charcoal. It is good enough that willow twigs were used as artists charcoal and the charcoal from the body wood was for gunpowder.

A scrubby willow branch can be used to hang things up to a pole (crane) over a fire too. Twisting the fine ends makes it possible to wrap them around the crane pole. You start with the fine tips and wrap the thicker part around the pole covering the tips. after a few wraps you just let it hang down with a carefully selected stub of a side branch as a hook for your pot.

In the spring you can pound the bark on smaller stems and twigs to get it to slip off as a tube. A bit of judicious whittling on the branch and the bark can make whistles or flutes. When you slide the bark back on it will shrink a bit as it dries out and it is reasonably permanent.
Some old people used to make animal calls this way.

Usually branches broken off in the spring can be planted and will grow.


Edit because I forgot to say that you want the willow wythes green or soaked again if they have dried out before you start working them to limber them up. They get stiff again as they dry.

Flexible branches bent in the middle can be used as pot holder "tongs" and firewood / coal movers "tongs."

Long branches can be anchored in holes, bent over to anchor in other holes to form shelter frames.

Weaving bird basket traps and cages.

Weaving fish basket traps and cages.

The infamous willow switch. I got whipped with one once by my mom when I was small. I can still remember how much it stung.

The classic I-forgot-my-toothbrush toothbrush using the frayed end of a small twig.