Description:

• Deciduous trees or shrubs with usually terete branches lacking terminal buds; winter buds each protected by a single outer scale, buds sometimes glutinous; branches ± flexible
• Leaves alternate, petiolate or sessile, oblong, lanceolate or linear, entire or serrulate; stipules various
• Inflorescences small, dense, usually erect, firm catkins, appearing before or with the leaves
• Flowers unisexual, entomophilous; borne in axil of an entire bract, with 1 or 2 small nectariferous glands at base
• Male flowers with 2 stamens or, in a few species, 3-many; filaments slender, free or sometimes connate, exceeding the scale
• Female flowers of a single ovary, composed of 2 carpels, sessile or stipitate; ovules often 4-8, arranged on 2 placentas; style often short, with 2 short, retuse or bifid stigmas
• Capsule many-seeded, dehiscing by 2 recurving valves
• Seeds many, long, enveloped in silky wool
• x = 19 (aneuploids, polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• Salix L.
  • Linnaeus: 1015 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 456 (1754)
  • Adanson: 376 (1763)
  • Jussieu: 408 (1789)
  • Willdenow: 655 (1806)
  • Thunberg: 30 (1823)
  • Andersson: 1 (1867)
  • Andersson: 190 (1868)
  • Bentham: 411 (1880)
  • Pax: 36 (1888)
  • Burtt Davy: 62 (1922)
  • Skan: 575 (1925)
  • Burtt Davy: 431 (1932)
  • Adamson: 310 (1950)
  • Friedrich-Holzhammer: 1 (1967)
  • Immelman: 171 (1987)
  • Wilmot-Dear: 120 (1991)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: ± 400, mostly in temperate parts of the northern hemisphere
• Southern Africa: 1 indigenous species with 5 subspecies, widespread along rivers; 4 exotic species have become naturalised of which one: *Salix babylonica L., the Weeping Willow, occurs widely along rivers and streams