Tales from my Backyard: Willow Trees

I first mentioned my unique willow trees on a post titled: The Tale of Three Trees.  You'll remember that 2 of them grew incredibly fast, while one just poked along, which is still the case! I'll tell you more about their growth next, but right now, I wanna share an experiment with you.

I read that willow clippings would actually root so I decided to try it straight in the ground in a very wet spot of the yard. (Yeah, it'd be nice if it'd soak up all that water in the spring and fall!)

So, I had the Executor of Experiments cut me off a rather large branch.(aka dh) We (well not me, the other parts of 'we') dug a very deep hole and planted the cut end, leaving several newly budding stems attached and underground.

Within days, the leaves were shriveling and dying and I told the EoE to trim it way back so it could use its energy to root rather than trying to leaf and survive all those little twigs. Within a few more days, it looked dead. It also got a little wobbly since we've had some very rough wind here lately, so we staked it and decided we wouldn't give up yet.

Well, that's been several weeks now and I really thought it might be months, if ever, before we'd see anything much at all out of it.

But to my delighted surprise, dh came to tell me that it was sprouting the other day.  Well, the first thing I had to do was grab my camera so I could take you girls along with me! (You didn't think I would leave you out, did you?)

Here on this little, brand new, green bud is a lady bug who probably is just as mesmerized with this new life as we are! Ain't that somethin'?!?!

 Now you may be wondering why on earth I would want so many willows. (Did you see the quick growth of those other two I told you about above?) Well, if you clicked over in that link above, you probably noticed that somebody really did a strange layout on this land and we have houses behind us, that face our back door.
Well, while we like our neighbors and have been blessed with very good ones, we still like some privacy. Its kind of a creepy feeling thinking they can see what I'm burning on the stove through my back door! ;-)