Salix cinerea L., Grey Willow
Account Summary
Native, common. Eurosiberian boreo-temperate, introduced rarely in eastern N America.
1881; Stewart, S.A.; Co Fermanagh.
This is a common enough shrub of wet ground, lake shores, thickets and the margins of woods. There are 48 records from 21 tetrads simply recorded as S. cinerea without reference to the subspecies. The great majority of these records were made by the EHS Habitat Survey team around Upper Lough Erne and on lake shores in the SE of the county. Detailed comments are made below under the two subspecies of S. cinerea.
Fermanagh occurrence
Nine of the twelve records for this hybrid in the Fermanagh Flora Database are credited to Matthew Tickner and were made by him on the rocky islands in Lower Lough Erne in the summer of 1989. In his Willows and Poplars Handbook, Meikle (1984) concluded that this hybrid is very common, that pure S. caprea (Goat Willow) is much less common than generally supposed, and that in disturbed habitats (eg in felled woodland), this hybrid with S. cinerea subsp. oleifolia (Rusty Willow), plus the latter species itself, often replace the pioneering colonist, S. caprea.
British and Irish occurrence
In the three NE counties of Ireland, Hackney reckoned that S. × reichardtii is more frequent than pure S. caprea in some districts, eg in E Down (FNEI 3). A very similar report was given in the recent Flora of Berkshire (Crawley 2005), but other recent local Floras from throughout B & I have generally tended to play down the presence and significance of this hybrid (eg Swan 1993; Woods 1993; Trueman et al. 1995; Brewis et al. 1996; Flora of Co Dublin; Beckett et al. 1999). In the Shropshire region, on the other hand, Sinker et al. (1985) considered that this hybrid is less common than is often imagined, although they acknowledge that hybrid swarms do occur, "where the parent species occur together in open communities with plenty of space for seedling establishment".
In Cumbria, Halliday (1997) reported 14 records of S. × reichardtii from several localities in the NE of the region, including around Penrith. It was particularly frequent on disturbed ground and was recorded chiefly by one particular field worker. Apart from this, Halliday's comment was, "otherwise apparently rather scarce". Nevertheless he reckoned that the position in Cumbria was a distortion of the true picture, blaming the laziness of most recorders who on finding both parent species in a tetrad, "not unnaturally tend to pass over inconvenient intermediates".
Exactly the same can be said of the Fermanagh experience and the patchy distribution of this hybrid plotted in the New Atlas hectad map indicates that this situation is commonplace and that our recording is undoubtedly deficient. We believe that Meikle (1984) was very accurate in his assessment of this hybrid and its parents. The problem is that the hybrid can be hard to distinguish from each of its parents and, where the two species occur together (or previously did so), they hybridize and backcross to produce an unbroken series of polymorphic, intermediate hybrid forms that intergrade between the parents (Meikle 1984; Sell & Murrell 2019). There is particular difficulty in separating the hybrid from S. caprea, a fact which undoubtedly inhibits recording. This can readily be seen in the map provided by Stace et al. (2015), where clustering of records denotes areas of the country visited by confident willow recorders.
Threats
None.