Day 125: I have my own pussywillow tree now, started from a slip nicked out of an abandoned city lot some twenty years back and now grown to a height of 15 feet, but during the era when I lived on one of southwest Washington's camas prairies, this iconic harbinger of spring was bloody hard to find. In prior years, it was my custom to cut a single branch to celebrate winter's passage, but when I moved to the prairie, most of the time I had to do without. In desperation, I decided to take matters into my own hands, literally. Equipping myself with copper wire, brown florists' tape and a package of silver-grey "deedly-balls," I counterfeited several twigs of our small native pussywillow, totally bogus but perennially in bloom. My living tree (a cultivated variety) has stouter stems and pointier catkins. Can you find the real one among the fakes?
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