15/11/2025
There’s a weeping willow in my mum’s garden that has quietly witnessed so much of our family life. I filmed it the other day while checking in on her, and it caught me in that way only certain trees can. The kind of moment where the past brushes up against the present and you feel it in your chest 💕
Willows have always been threaded through folk stories as companions in heavy times. They bend, they yield, they weather what comes. There’s something grounding in that. A reminder to soften rather than snap.
In practice, it’s the bark of white willow and purple willow that herbalists use, not the weeping kind. Those are the species with the written history and the evidence behind them. A weeping willow still carries the same family of natural salicylates, but it isn’t a tree we harvest.
Yet standing under my mum’s tree, the medicine feels different anyway. It sits in the roots and the memories, in the way a place can hold the shape of a family over decades. Sometimes that’s the kind of healing we need most 🥰
If you like plant stories that sit close to real life, I’d love to have you here ☺️
