Plant Profile - Blue-Stem Willow (Salix irrorata)

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Published: 18 June 2020

We highlight the blue-stem willow (Salix irrorata) describing its appearance, care, and landscape use in our local climate.

=== Video Transcript ===

This is a new type of video that we hope to provide throughout the year - this is our plant profile video that we will be uploading to YouTube occasionally when we have the time. Today we're going to highlight the blue stem willow, or dewy willow, dewystem willow. It is from the western United States in the Rocky Mountains. Its Latin name is Salix irrorata. It is a 10-15 foot shrub. It could be used in rain gardens and in general cultivation. It's very easy to grow. Like most willows, just give it lots of moisture in a sunny location.

A lot of Western species don't do that great here in the Ohio Valley because of our higher summer humidity and more frequent rainfall, but this plant does seem to do pretty well here. Not a lot of leaf issues in terms of some of the leaf spots and rust that willows do get. You can see it has a very rounded, dense-growing habit, silvery undersides to its leaves, and then the stems are kind of a nice bluish color, kind of a powdery-blue if you look real close. Kind of expose this one stem here. It's a very attractive plant.

We have labels on most of our plants in the Arboretum; sometimes you have to really search to find them if some of our plants have grown more rapidly recently and outgrown the label. But this plants label is right here, as an example. Everything is also located on a website interactive map that you can use to look at our collections, and we also have printed-out maps that can be found in our kiosks.

So hopefully you liked this video. If you did, please remember to like the video and subscribe to our Channel. Have a great day!