The Willow of the Veenbos

A willow that reaches two centuries has almost always been cut, and cut hard, over and over. White willow is a fast, soft, short-lived tree left to itself: it puts on height quickly, gets heavy, splits down the middle at forty or fifty years and collapses. The ones that get old are the ones that were pollarded, cut back to the same point on the trunk every three to eight years for the withies. Doing that keeps the crown light, keeps the tree from tearing itself apart, and produces the shape everybody recognises from a Dutch polder: a short fat trunk, usually hollow, with a mop of thin straight rods on top. So the age band of 1800 to 1850 on this tree is really a record of how many times somebody came back with a saw. It stands in the Veenbos in an old polder at Grootschermer, north of the city, in exactly the landscape the species belongs to: peat, ditches, water at the surface, and no shelter at all. Go in winter. A pollarded willow in a flat wet polder under a low sun is one of the sights this country actually does better than anywhere else.