Charles G. Harper

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:

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.

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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.

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.