| Salix pulchra Cham. | |||
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| Family | Salicaceae — APG family: Salicaceae | ||
| Description | Shrub up to 3 meters tall, slightly pubescent, with long, soft hairs when young, but soon glabrous; leaves (highly variable in form) are broad, diamond-shaped or elliptical in the typical form, obovate-oval (var. Lodfliae Ball), or lanceolate, green above, more or less glaucous beneath, entire in the margin or slightly serrulate at base; stipules narrowly linear, acute, persisting (the best characteristic of the species) ; previous year’s leaves often persisting as brown, withered remains; catkins sessile, erect; scales blackish; capsules silky-pubescent; stamens 2. | ||
| Ecology | The most common willow in the area of interest, often forming extensive thickets above timberline in the mountains of the Yukon, to at least 1,750 meters. | ||
| Taxonomy notes | Possibly better regarded as a subspecies of the very closely related S. phylicifolia. Forms hybrid swarms with S. phylicifolia subsp. planifolia in the upper Yukon val- ley, and hybrids with S. arbusculoides (no. 53, below) and S. arctica (no. 9, above). Var. Palméri Ball, with narrowly oblong, elliptical-oblong, or elliptical-lanceolate leaves, occurs in extreme arctic or alpine situations; var. yukonénsis Schneid., with pubescent twigs, occurs at scattered localities (probably indicating a hybrid in- fluence). Broken line on circumpolar map indicates range of subsp. parallelinérvis (Flod.) A. Skvortz. (S. parallelinervis Flod.). | ||
| Uses | The young leaves are eaten raw or mixed with seal oil by the natives of Siberia. |
This is a digital representation of Eric Hultén’s ‘Flora of Alaska and Neighboring Territories: A Manual of the Vascular Plants’, which was published by Stanford University Press in 1968. The book was digitized by C. Webb (at UAMN) as part of the Flora of Alaska project, with funding by the US NSF (Grant 1759964 to Ickert-Bond & Webb), and with permission of Stanford University Press. Data and images © 1968 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. Univ. Usage licence: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. NB: You may find OCR errors; please refer to the hard-copy if in doubt.