by Piter Kehoma Boll
Whenever one hears to word “willow”, the image that comes to mind is of a nice tree such as the weeping willow and the white willow . The genus Salix, however, includes hundreds of species, and some of them look very different from a weeping willow.
One of those peculiar species is Salix arctica, the arctic willow. As its name suggests, the arctic willow grows far north in the world, in the Arctic region. It is, in fact, the northernmost woody plant in the world, occuring in Eurasia and North America. Its distribution extends beyond the so-called tree line, which marks the northern limit in which trees can grow. As a result, despite being a willow, the arctic willow is not a tree. Actually it is so small that even calling it a shrub is weird.
The arctic willow lives as a creeping plant, growing very close to the ground and usually growing up to 15 cm in height, although it may reach 25 cm in warmer places or, in some exceptional cases, 50 cm. It as small hairy leaves and, like all willows, male and female flowers occur in separate plants, i.e., the arctic willow is a dioecious species.
Flowers occur in the typical catkin inflorescence of willows and many other trees and are pollinated by insects. Female catkins are hairier than male ones and have somehow conic carpels with a dark-red pistil. Male catkins have very visible stamens with red anthers that turn yellow when they become covered by the released pollen.
Despite its small size, the arctic willow is a very important plant in many aspects. It is an important, and sometimes the solely, food source of many arctic species. Among humans, it has a major role in Inuit and Gwich’in cultures, being used as fuel, medicine and sometimes even as food.
The arctic willow can live more than 80 years and, as it is a woody plant living in a very extreme environment, it produces growth rings like an ordinary tree and they have recently been proved to be a good source on climatic data of the Arctic.
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References:
Kevan PG (1990) Sexual differences in temperatures of blossoms on a dioecious plant, Salix arctica: Significance for life in the Arctic. Arctic and Alpine Research 22:283–289. doi: 10.1080/00040851.1990.12002792
Schmidt NM, Baittinger C, Forchhammer MC (2006) Reconstructing century-long snow regimes using estimates of High Arctic Salix arctica Radial Growth. Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 38: 257–262. doi: 10.1657/1523-0430(2006)38[257:RCSRUE]2.0.CO;2
Schmidt NM, Baittinger C, Kollmann J, Forchhammer MC (2010) Consistent Dendrochronological Response of the Dioecious Salix arctica to Variation in Local Snow Precipitation across Gender and Vegetation Types. Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research 42: 471–476. doi: 10.1657/1938-4246-42.4.471
Woodcock H, Bradley RS (1994) Salix arctica (Pall.): its potential for dendroclimatological studies in the high Arctic. Dendrocronologia 12: 11–22.
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