The Willow-Fluff of Peking Under Threat – Leave the Poor Wandering Souls Alone

I read a story the other day that the Beijing government is planning to poison the city’s female poplar and willow trees – the ones that produce the floating cottonwood, or catkins, that suffuses the air of the city in early Spring. Now I know a lot of people don’t like it and it upsets their nasal passages etc, but personally I love it and see it as an essential part of Peking. The plan involves injecting poison into the trees.

I’ve mentioned this before and one irate reader contacted me to say that I shouldn’t care about the poplar and willow trees as they were all planted in the 1960s by the communists and I don’t like them so I shouldn’t like the trees. Well, it may be true that I don’t much care for communists but it’s not quite the case about the trees – there was indeed a bunch of new plantings in the 1960s but the willow and poplar go back much further and have been an integral part of Peking’s exit from a harsh winter into a mild spring for a lot longer.

Nowadays people do mostly moan about the drifting cottonwood but they used to think very differently – here’s that old Pekinger Harold Acton on the subject:

‘The air was full of willow-fluff that blew up from the trees on the southern side of the (Tartar) Wall (the Chinese will tell you that each of those flakes is a wandering soul).’

So next time you feel inclined to moan about the cottonwood remember that each tuft may just be a wandering soul….