Willow Tree

Currently, we're staying in Willow Trees Apartment, here in 4445 Pacific Coast Highway, Torrance, California.

I've always wonder how does a willow tree look like. Not sure what it's called in Bahasa Melayu. But I'm pretty sure that there's no willow tree in Malaysia. Well, there's a big one in front of the apartment's office. From my apartment's verandah, I can also see the tree. I wonder how old it is. It must have seen years of historic events..perhaps even the war between the states? Haha..that's too much an imagination I guess.


This is the willow tree near the apartment' office.

Here's some info on willow tree that I got from Wikipedia:

Willows, sallows and osiers form the genus Salix, around 400 species[1] of deciduous trees and shrubs, found primarily on moist soils in cold and temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Most species are known as willow, but some narrow-leaved shrub species are called osier, and some broader-leaved species are called sallow (the latter name is derived from the Latin word salix, willow).
The willows all have abundant watery sap, bark which is heavily charged with salicylic acid, soft, usually pliant, tough wood, slender branches and large, fibrous, often stoloniferous roots. The roots are remarkable for their toughness, size, and tenacity of life, and roots readily grow from aerial parts of the plant.

The leaves are typically elongated but may also be round to oval, frequently with a serrated margin. All the buds are lateral; no absolutely terminal bud is ever formed. The buds are covered by a single scale, enclosing at its base two minute opposite buds, alternately arranged, with two, small, scale-like, fugacious, opposite leaves. The leaves are alternate, except the first pair which fall when about an inch long. They are simple, feather-veined, and typically linear-lanceolate. Usually they are serrate, rounded at base, acute or acuminate. The leaf petioles are short, the stipules often very conspicuous, looking like tiny round leaves and sometimes remaining for half the summer. On some species, however, they are small, inconspicuous, and fugacious (soon falling). In color the leaves show a great variety of greens, ranging from yellowish to bluish

The fruit is a small, one-celled, two-valved, cylindrical beaked capsule containing numerous tiny (0.1 mm) seeds. The seeds are furnished with long, silky, white hairs, which allow the fruit to be widely dispersed by the wind.

The leaves and bark of the willow tree have been mentioned in ancient texts from Assyria, Sumer and Egypt[5] as a remedy for aches and fever,[6] and the Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote about its medicinal properties in the 5th century BC. Native Americans across the American continent relied on it as a staple of their medical treatments. This is because they contain salicylic acid, the precursor to aspirin.

In JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, there is an ancient tree on the school grounds of Hogwarts called the "Whomping Willow". It is provided as a hiding spot of a secret passageway that Professor Remus Lupin roamed through every full moon when he began his transformation into a werewolf.