Wearing the green willow

RANK by rank they go, forward and back, wheeling and turning and lining up again, their precision defined by their black bearskins. No matter how the sun beats down, their lines do not falter. We wonder how they fare under that tall, traditional headgear, but the guardsman’s bearskin, officially a ‘cap’, is mercifully not as weighty and ungainly as it appears. The covering, black skin from a Canadian bear culled to control numbers, is stretched over a lightweight frame woven from Somerset willow—3,500 acres of the Levels are devoted to the moisture-loving trees. The cap weighs only 1½lb.

‘The oldest surviving willow artefact, the Antrea net, has been dated to 8,540bc’

There are willows and willows. Botanical observation over the centuriesfurnishing long props to support Roman vines and bark strips for binding shoots. In his of 1660, the scholar John Ray noted 10 species growing near Cambridge and the 1724 edition of his work supplied Carl Linnaeus with material for his 1737 classification of 19 willows. The number rose to 31 in his 1753 revision, although he made a mistake on the way. Encountering a new variety with dramatically drooping branches in a garden in The Netherlands in 1736, he took a lead from Psalm 137 that relates how the exiled Israelites sat down and wept by the waters of Babylon, hanging their harps on the willows there. Linneaus, therefore, classified the ‘weeping willow’ as , unaware that the drooping trees along the Euphrates were actually poplars.