The spring equinox is that invisible time of year when everything is happening but nothing shows. Shortly the pastels and greens of buds, flowers, and leaves will tint the wooded hillsides. Migrating birds will return, and the earliest wild flowers will appear on the forest floor. As I look out my window on an overcast March day, however, it seems that winter has managed to kill off just about everything this year. These transitional days are a good time to look for quiet reassurances — like pussy willows.

Pussy willows need no introduction. Even in this era of television and "indoor insights, " most people are familiar with the pussy willow. They may have even rubbed one against their cheeks, around their lips, or under their ears. The pussy willow invites this intimacy, even if giving human beings pleasure is not its primary purpose.

Pussy willows are the male portion of the willow tree's reproductive system. Shortly, the smooth, silver "pussies" will open into yellow, pollen-laden catkins. In willow trees male catkins grow on one tree, and different-looking female catkins grow on another. But nature has made perfect plans to see that the male pollen will reach the female catkins so that willow trees can reproduce their kind.

When bees first start looking for food in the spring, they head straight for the willow trees because willows are among the earliest pollen and nectar producers. The hungry bees gather some pollen from the male trees and then visit the female trees for nectar. The bees pollinate the willows unwittingly while they themselves are gathering food.

If you'd like to watch the silver-gray bud of the pussy willow turn into a pollen-bearing catkin, you can bring a twig indoors and put it in a glass of water. Willow twigs are amazingly adaptable. A twig in water will eventually root, and if it's I returned to moist soil it will grow into a new willow tree. A twig can produce a new willow more rapidly than a willow seed that has to start from scratch.

The best place to look for pussy willows is along the banks of a stream, near wet ditches, around the edges of a pond or marsh, or anywhere the ground stays wet. Willows provide an important service to the wet soil they grow in. Their roots are thick, fibrous masses that hold onto soil during floods and periods of high water.

Willows are a large and varied group of trees, including more than 100 species in North America. The weeping willow, a cousin of the pussy willow, is a native of China, but it has been planted so widely throughout the world that it is as familiar to most of us as the pussy willow. In addition to having so many different species, willows also have the ability to interbreed, making identification difficult even for experienced botanists.

All willows have male or female catkins, but there's only one species that has the soft silver buds that we think of as pussy willows. It's a shrubby tree with a short trunk and lots of branches, sometimes growing twenty to twenty-five feet tall The pussy willow's Latin name is Salix discolor. It grows throughout the Northeast and as far south as Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri.

Salix discolor may be just another shrubby willow during most of the year, but in early spring its familiar buds are a promise of returning life. They offer us a little hint of this year's color amidst the browns and grays of last year's life.

Copyright Gale Lawrence

THE BEGINNING NATURALIST: Weekly Encounters with the Natural World by Gale Lawrence is available through the Naturalist's Almanac Bookstore: CLICK HERE