By request of Esther Meijer. Esther is a PhD candidate at Durham University, UK. She works on the use of water and rivers as a conduit of memory, and has recently published a chapter in the edited volume Landscapes of War in Greek and Roman Literature. She enjoys cheese and has a cracking sense of humour.
The willow (Latin: salix) is one of the more frequent appearances in the Roman Trees Database. It is one of the most recognisable trees of the modern world, although the genus has some fairly substantial variations, from the iconic weeping willow (salix babylonica) to the less well know flamingo willow (salix integra 'Flamingo'). Roman approaches to this tree were less varied than our modern scientific approach, and this blog will address two common features across Latin descriptions of the tree: its habitat and its shade.
Habitat
When Columella writes about planting willow trees, he tells us that it 'thrives in well-watered ground' (De re rustica 4.31.2). Lucretius, in the De rerum natura, tells us that the willow enjoys river banks (2.361), an observation echoed by Vergil in the Georgics (2.110; 4.26), Ovid in the Fasti (2.466), and in a fragment of the republican comic playwright Plautus (Fragment 17, found in Festus 80L). The willow tree thrives in damp soil and on river banks.
Writing in the Natural History, Pliny the Elder tells us that the willow tree grows well in marshy land (31.44), and so it should come as no surprise that Ovid tells us that the original site of Rome, which was extremely marshy prior to the construction of adequate drainage between the hills, was populated with willow trees:
Where processions now go through the Velabrum to the Circus, there was nothing but willow trees and hollow reeds. (Fasti 6.406)
The area that Ovid is describing is a valley in the oldest part of Rome, near the Forum Boarium (cattle market), between the Palatine hill and the Tiber river. It is often identified as the founding area of Rome, and was historically a flood plain for the Tiber. Temples in the Forum Boarium include the Temple of Portunus (right), the god of ports and harbours. While it is no longer next to the Tiber in modern Rome, it was once.
So what we find here is that willows live by the river, and in the eyes of one poet, have been a part of Rome's flora since the city's earliest days.
Shade
When someone mentions a willow tree, the first thing people tend to think of is the shade. In the town where I grew up, a number of willow trees stood on the flood plain between the river and an artificial stream, made to move the mill's wheel. One year, the local council trimmed the bottoms off these trees, in the name of being able to police the dappled shade better. And we were not the first to be hiding behind the branches of a droopy willow tree.
My darling would lie by my side among the willow, under the supple vines.
Vergil describes a pair of lovers lying with each other in the shade of a willow tree, a peaceful scene in the Eclogues (10.40). Elsewhere in the Eclogues (3.65), another lover hides in the willow, this time Galatea, running under them after throwing an apple at Damoetas. Other poets, such as Calpurnius Siculus, describe the shade. For Calpurnius, it's not a lover, but a bull in the shade, relaxing in the cool air (Eclogues 3.14-19).
Willows are a key element in the Roman idea of a tranquil location, one for secret trysts (or cattle). They grow by rivers, but never by a torrent, and have been a part of Rome's landscape since Rome began. It is little wonder then that, following his exile, Ovid was devastated when he found not a single willow in Pontus.
No fields here produce any fruit, no sweet grapes. There are no willows on the banks, nor oaks on the hill. (Ex Pont. 1.3.51-2)