HARVESTS OF THE THAMES: WILLOWS, OSIERS, RUSHES
The willows, pollarded or left to their natural growth, that form, as it
were, a continuous guard of honour along many miles of the upper course
of the Thames, and overhang with a wild luxuriance its mazy backwaters,
are indeed a guard to those banks in more than fanciful phrase. Their
tangled roots clutch them in many-fingered embrace and support them in
times of flood, and their gnarled and fantastic trunks serve the useful
office at such times (when the meadows are under water and resemble
inland lakes) of exactly delimiting the course of the stream, where the
current runs deep and strong, and dangerous. Willows we always associate
with a watery situation, and their habit is indeed better suited to
low-lying meadows and to river-courses than to places high and dry. The
great demands the willow makes upon water place it in the forefront as a
drainer of marshy soil: and thus not only beside the Thames, but along
rivers in general, and in the fens and on Sedgemoor, where the energies
of hundreds of years past have been directed towards expelling the water,
it is a familiar feature of the landscape. We also inevitably associate
the willow, and especially that drooping variety, of the pendant boughs
and leaves, known as the “weeping willow,” with melancholy, and, from
Shakespeare to W. S. Gilbert, it is associated with unrequited love. The
spot where Ophelia met her death is thus described in Shakespeare:
“There is a willow grows ascaunt the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves on the glassy stream.”
The expression “hoar leaves” refers to the under side of the willow-leaf,
of a whitish or silvery hue, not unlike hoar-frost; prominently seen when
a strong wind ruffles the branches.
[Illustration: A THAMES-SIDE FARM.]
The love-lorn among the characters in the operas written by Sir W. S.
Gilbert plentifully carry on the old tradition, and from Archibald
Grosvenor (“The All-Right”) and Patience, in the duet “Hey, Willow-waly
O!” to Teresa, in _The Mountebanks_, who sings, “Willow, willow, where’s
my love?” they frequently apostrophise this tearful tree. Nay, even in
the _Bab Ballads_ we read of a troubadour whose refrain was “Willow,
willow, o’er the lea,” and who maintained it with such pertinacity that
it is at last rightly described as “his aggravating willow.”
No one can pretend that a freshly-pollarded willow is a beautiful object,
as it stands up, naked, by the riverside, shorn of all its branches, and
resembling nothing but some rude gigantic club with fist-like, knuckly
head, whence those branches have been ruthlessly cut away. Even after two
or three seasons, when those branches have been allowed to grow again and
to present a more or less mop-like head of foliage, the pollarded willows
look whimsically like so many Shockheaded Peters, after the style of the
familiar _Struwelpeter_ German toy-book. Not beautiful, and not perhaps
ugly, they are the grotesque comedians of the riverside scenery.
The willow is what scientists and arboriculturists might—and possibly
do—style an “economic” tree; that is to say, it has commercially useful
features. Its bark is an excellent medicine for ague, and useful for
tanning, although oak-bark is better. The ancient Britons wove their
light boats, their “coracles,” from willow-wands, and cricket-bats are
now made from its wood. Thus descriptive writers upon cricket-matches,
thinking to be picturesque, are frequently found using the vicious phrase
“wielders of the willow,” when in fact they mean batsmen. Many varieties
of coarse baskets are now manufactured from willow branches. Hence the
assiduous pollarding of the willow about once every seventh year, in the
middle of winter.
Even the familiar osiers of the Thames have some of these economic uses,
and the osiers themselves are a variety of willow.
“By the rushy fringèd bank,
Where grows the willow and the osier dank,”
says Milton, illustrating, in his _Comus_, the almost inevitable
companionship of these leafy cousins.
If we wished most strikingly and picturesquely to describe the difference
between an osier and a willow, we should say that an osier was a willow
without a trunk. The osiers grow in beds, as a dense array of upright
rods, and, to the uninitiated, there is but one kind of osier, but
experts are said to be able to distinguish three hundred varieties.
Experts are wondrous folk. Strange to say, although we associate osiers
with watery flats and soggy patches of ground, the “hams,” or “holts,”
as the osier-beds are generally styled, must, if it is desired to grow a
good crop, by no means be saturated with water. To successfully form an
osier-plantation, the land must be well trenched or otherwise drained of
all stagnant or surplus water. Basket-willows refuse to thrive in land
that is awash, and they require the sustenance of good manure. Weeds,
too, hinder their growth, and they are susceptible to attacks from fly.
All these particulars doubtless come as surprising information to those
whose life on the Thames consists merely of rowing, sailing, or camping.
If they notice the numerous osier-beds at all, it is only to wonder idly
at the dense thickets of tall straight rods they form; and it is but
rarely suspected, either that they are carefully planted and tended, or
that the crop of rods is both valuable and precarious.
An osier-bed is formed by planting cuttings of some six inches in length.
Like cuttings from its big brother, the willow, they strike easily, and
soon form vigorous plants. Indeed, in the case of green poles and posts
made of willow, many worthy housewives have frequently been astonished at
finding the posts they use for hanging out the domestic washing budding
lustily and becoming healthy trees.
An osier-rod of one year’s growth is ripe for cutting, and cutting
proceeds every year, from the established stool: the season’s growth
being, according to the variety, and to circumstances, anything from ten
to fifteen feet.
Osier-growing is a considerable industry, and, with due care and ordinary
good fortune, very profitable; for there is not at present a sufficiency
grown in England to satisfy the demand, and we thus import largely from
France, Belgium, and Holland. But, as shown already, the osier requires
to be properly tended, and has its enemies. Prominent among these is
the water-rat, whose destructive habits, in gnawing through the base of
half-grown rods, are very costly to growers.
The rods are cut in autumn or winter, and are then sorted into four
sizes, known as “Luke,” “Threepenny,” “Middleborough,” and “Great.” Of
these, “Luke” is the smallest. They are done up for sale in “bolts,”
_i.e._ bundles, forty inches round.
To prepare osier-rods for basket-weaving, they are stacked upright in
shallow trenches filled with water, their butt-ends immersed from six to
eight inches; and thus they are left until spring, when, with the rising
of the sap, they begin to throw out buds. When April at last is merging
into May, the rods have already burst into leaf and begun forming roots.
Then is the opening of the rod-strippers’ season; for at this juncture
the bark is most easily separated from the rods. Rod-stripping is one
of the few surviving primitive rustic industries, carried on, according
to the mildness, or otherwise, of the spring, in the open air, or in
rustic sheds. This is pre-eminently an occupation for women and children,
and generally forms a picturesque scene, not remotely unlike a gipsy
encampment. The immemorial instrument used in peeling or stripping the
rods is a “break,” formed of two pieces of iron or steel mounted side
by side on a wooden post, about waist-high, somewhat resembling an
exaggerated tuning-fork, or a “Jew’s harp.” The rods are drawn through
the springy embraces of this contrivance, which thus cleanly strips
away the bark, and leaves the rod a pure white wand. For the protection
of more than usually delicate rods from being bruised, the breaks are
occasionally faced with india-rubber.
The whereabouts of a busy group of osier-peelers are readily discovered
from some little distance, for the operation of drawing the rods through
the breaks is accompanied by a sharp metallic “ping”; a chorus of these
sounds in several keys carrying a long way across the still meadows. And
if not by sound, certainly by sense of smell is the group of busy workers
to be located, for the stripped osiers, or rather, the peelings from
them, give forth a strongly aromatic and pungent odour.
The peeled rods are then carefully dried and stored away. They form
the material for white baskets, or for baskets that are to be dyed.
The rods from which yellow or brown baskets are to be made are treated
differently, being peeled in hot water, or in steam; this method—known
as “peeling buff”—bringing out the juices of the rods and staining the
surface, according to the variety of osier, buff, brown, or yellow.
The ancient method of keeping count of the number of bolts stripped by
each worker was identical with that employed in the hop-gardens, and is
still frequently used. This is by “tally.” Computation by tally is one of
the most ancient—perhaps _the_ most ancient—means of reckoning known, and
preceded the use of arithmetic. It consists of taking a short stick of
some soft wood, splitting it into equal halves, and cutting notches along
it. This method of keeping count is simplicity itself, and absolutely
beyond possibility of fraud or error. The method employed was, and is, to
give each worker half of the split tally stick; the other half being kept
by the foreman. In osier-stripping, upon a bolt, or bundle, of rods being
finished, the foreman takes the worker’s half of the tally, and, fitting
it to the half he carries, cuts a notch; and so on with each successive
bolt. The point is that the notches of these two halves must of necessity
agree, or “tally.”
The tally system of accounts lasted until a very late period in those
most conservative of institutions, Government offices, and it was the
accidental flare-up of a great mass of old Exchequer tallies that
destroyed the old Houses of Parliament at Westminster, in 1834.
The rushes, too, that grow so luxuriantly beside the waters of the upper
Thames have some economic value, and form a very bulky harvest. The
usual frequenters of the Thames, who see nothing of the river in spring,
autumn, or winter, think of the rushes only as those tall sword-like
blades of living green that keep guard along so many miles of meadows;
but the Thames in April shows a very different complexion of affairs.
Then the rush has merely begun to show its sword-point above the water;
and does not attain its full height until June. It is in flower during
July and August; and in that last month comes the harvest. It is perhaps
rather risky harvesting, and is accomplished from a punt. The rush-cutter
comes to his work armed with a reaping-hook fixed to the end of a long
pole, so that he is enabled to reach deep down below the surface of the
water, where the rushes spring from their roots.
The cut rushes are spread out in the meadows, to dry, for two or three
weeks; and, being so largely charged with water, diminish remarkably in
the process of drying; a freshly-cut shock of sixty-eight inches’ girth
shrinking to a bolt of forty inches. A bolt of this size is generally
sold for one shilling. Dried rushes are used for making light baskets,
and often for thatching; but in olden times one of the principal uses
for them was the strewing of floors in the home, for those were the
days before the introduction of carpets. The peculiarly sweet scent of
the dried rush made it especially welcome for this purpose, and a fresh
supply of rushes was thought the right of every new guest. But the
rush-strewn floors of those ancient domestic interiors had their own
peculiar dangers and nastinesses, if the sweeping and the renewing were
not frequent; for the dogs of the household generally lived and slept in
the house, and it was the usual practice for guests at table to fling
them bones and unappetising pieces of fat, which therefore often lurked
unsuspected for the unwary heel among the rushes; often enough only
belatedly revealing their presence to the nose.