Salix koriyanagi ‘Rubykins’

The willows gave the world its first painkiller. Willow bark, steeped by Greek and Native American healers alike for fever and ache, carries salicin, the compound nineteenth-century chemists refined into salicylic acid and, in time, aspirin, which still wears the genus name buried in the chemistry. This particular willow comes by a quieter trade. Salix koriyanagi is the Korean basket willow, the name meaning just that, long grown across Korea, Japan, and China for slender rods woven into baskets and furniture by hands that wanted something straight, supple, and strong.

'Rubykins' is a red-flowered female selection of that old working species, made by the Illinois willow man Bill Wandell, and the plant keeps the basket willow's virtues while adding a show. In earliest spring, ahead of the leaves, the bare stems line themselves with small ruby catkins set in neat opposite pairs, an arrangement most willows never trouble with. The foliage follows, narrow and lance-shaped, flushed pink as it opens and settling to a cool blue-green that holds all season. Come the cold, the bare branches turn a warm yellow, so there is something to look at in nearly every month the plant is out of flower.

'Rubykins' wants damp feet, happiest at a pond edge, a rain garden, or any low wet corner, and answers a hard yearly coppice by throwing long pliant rods, good for weaving or for cutting an armful of catkins for the late-winter table. A willow that earns a place three seasons running and turns ruby in the fourth, which is more than most shrubs of the same size will promise.

Photographs courtesy of Lakeshore Willows and Missouri Botanical Garden.