White Willow

It roots fast on a gravel bar scoured clean by a flood, grows up in crowded thickets, and by forty or fifty years is usually splitting apart under its own soft, fast-grown wood. The ones that reach two centuries are almost always the ones that were pollarded, cut back hard to the same point on the trunk every few years, which is the history behind Alkmaar's willow in the old Veenbos polder, closing in on two hundred years old. Munich's stands alone on the Isar's northern floodplain, unusual enough on its own that the city's 2021 natural monument ordinance protects it for that solitude. Gdansk's, beside a pond in Oliwa, survived an arson attack on 29 December 2025 that burned out its core before firefighters arrived in time to save the second protected willow growing next to it.