ANOTHER LIFE: Among the mournful, wind-whipped twigs that web the acre at the end of winter (grey sycamore, purple birch, black alder), the branches of the golden willow in the old hen run snare the sun in a fiery glow, writes Michael Viney.
It has taken a few years to grow a full tree from a stick the length of my arm, pushed deep into the ground, but that simple act of propagation has now rewarded us with a home-grown charm against Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Such trees are scattered thinly all over the west, in hedgerows and old gardens, their winter bark shading through yellows and ochres to bright vermilion. They are heaven-sent varieties of the "white" willow, Salix alba, with its silver-felted leaves, and, like Jean Giono's man who planted acorns, I should take to the roads with a bundle of golden willow-wands, shoving one in wherever the soil looks likely.
The more I learn about willows, the more respect I have for them. In the High Arctic, where a prostrate, ankle-high species is the last tree to give up, I watched improbable bumble bees droning to summer catkins held up from the ground like candle-flames. Beside me now, a white willow (of sorts) sprawls across the stream in the hollow beside the house, a great candelabra of curving boughs, rooted in one bank and resting its elbows on the other.
It makes a climbing-frame for foraging blue tits and chaffinches and busy willow warblers, but much of the life it serves is less visible. A classic British study found that willows support no fewer than 450 plant-eating insects and mites - more, even, than the oak. Even allowing for the Irish shortfall in species, the willow is still more valuable to our insect biodiversity than any other tree.
The more I learn about it, also, the more confused I can get. Webb's Irish Flora, the basic handbook of our plants, lists 15 kinds of willow, but talks of another 18 hybrids, many of them springing up spontaneously between native species and showing the characteristics of both (or even three) parents, not necessarily in equal measure. As Charles Nelson suggested in his Trees of Ireland, such promiscuity can make identification "difficult or, at times, almost impossible".
White willow is similar in build to the crack willow, Salix fragilis, that decorates so many of Ireland's less-developed waterways (both trees make a shimmering delight of Co Leitrim in the spring). It is called "crack" from a brittleness that lets its twigs snap off at the base and causes its fast- growing trunk to split or collapse under its own weight - devices, perhaps, to send a chunk of wood downstream to start another tree.
Along roadside ditches and bog margins the commonest willows, often not much more than shrubs in size, are the grey, eared and goat willows, generally lumped together as "sallies" and providing the furry, pussy-willow buds as foils to a vase of daffodils at Easter. The more valuable kind of sally, however, the kind used for making lobster-pots, turf creels, potato baskets and so on, is the common osier, Salix viminalis - this not originally a native, but naturalised in this island for thousands of years.
I have been learning about it, and much else, in Basketmaking in Ireland (Wordwell, €24.13), a superb account of the craft's history, techniques and species by Joe Hogan, himself an outstanding basketmaker and a leader in the craft's revival. A settler in the west in the 1970s, his "sally gardens" grow in the shelter of dry-stone walls beside Lough Na Fooey, wedged between mountains west of Clonbur in Co Galway.
Here, his willows can shoot up by as much as three metres a year, and include the purple osier and almond willow to supply the slender, supple twigs for finer baskets. Looking at the beautiful work in his book, one has to regret that bulk-buying supermarket habits have made the everyday shopping basket so redundant. In those we now buy for logs and laundry, fruit and pot-plants, we celebrate the handiwork and flowing, natural forms unique to this skilful craft.
A completely different perspective on the willow is its future in growing biomass for energy production. It is 20 years or more since the first Irish trials of "superwillow" species opened up an alternative use for set-aside farmland or cutaway bog: a coppiced harvest of willow reeds every third year, to be burned in the ESB power-stations currently fuelled with milled peat.
Jim Martin, a retired engineer who worked with Bord na Móna for almost 40 years, has been a tireless advocate of this replacement fuel.
If, as seems probable, we have been waiting for Britain to lead the way, the reprieve for the UK's pioneer willow-biomass power station at Eggborough in North Yorkshire should augur well. This is part of a national commitment to renewable sources of energy such as wind, wave and solar power. It is a source that is "carbon-neutral"; the carbon dioxide released in its burning is equal to that absorbed in its growing. In Ireland, too, great tracts of new sally gardens could be not only wildlife-friendly but, in the right shades of flame, a bright, soul-warming addition to the winter countryside.