The Beauty of Lining a River With Willow

In the Stone Age, Neolithic folks used willow branches and mud to build roundhouses for their families. Jump forward several thousand years and European farmers were fashioning panels of stitched willow, called hurdles, to fence their farms or screen their gardens.

Meanwhile, Native Americans constructed frames of black willow stakes and branches for the sweat lodges where their spirits were purified. Today, dozens of species of willow are fitting into the toolkits of ecologists and conservationists, who find these trees fine specimens for preventing the decimation of the Ohio River Basin.

By incorporating willow, their aim is to minimize erosion while keeping its seven major tributaries as free of pollutants as possible. That basin, the largest riparian offshoot of the Mississippi, is one of its most precarious, mainly as a result of unpredictable flows and decades of pollution from the likes of power plant drainage and fertilizer runoff.

Riverbanks in the Cincinnati area and in Appalachian Ohio, experts say, need to be stabilized not just to keep farmland and townships flood-free, but to keep the waters from the Muskingum to the Little Miami flowing rhythmically and consistently southeastward into the Mississippi. And willows, conservationists and growers say, may be one of the most sustainable, two-birds-one-stone fixes to getting that done. Living Willow Farm hosts workshops on the uses, physical properties and field cultivation of willow. Credit: Howard Peller / Living Willow Farm.

“What’s not to love?” says Amy Stewart, owner of 65Willows, a willow farm 20 minutes west of Cincinnati. “They are incredibly easy to propagate. They grow like weeds. They grow on every continent in the world except for Antarctica.

They’re very adaptable. They don t particularly care what kind of soil they re in. And they are great for riverbanks because they re water loving plants.” If I’m the head of a conservancy district or the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, my traditional route to firming up banks and bends is reaching for rocks riprap, loose stone tossed in heaps, or a slanted slope of concrete.

The issue in someone like Stewart’s mind is that that rock, which can cost hundreds of dollars per ton, isn’t doing much other than one, singular task: Preventing erosion. What farms like 65Willows can do is provide conservationists with live willow stakes (rods ready to green) that they can use instead. These conservationists will stick thousands of stakes, buds-up, into the riverbank in a zigzag, diamond pattern, miles at a time, with the hope that in three to four months their roots will lodge tightly into the earth, creating an underground patchwork strong enough to keep high waters at bay.

Weighed down by negative news? Our smart, bright, weekly newsletter is the uplift you’ve been looking for. [contact-form-7] Although willow posting has been a practice since the early 1990s in Ohio, with the restoration of the Mohican River, the method of staking riverbanks has been resurfacing in the past five years, as conservancies spend pandemic-era dollars gathering willow rods from nearby farms for about $1 a stake, or sometimes just gratis.

They’re being planted up on the Chagrin River in Cuyahoga County; to help restore Mill Creek and Paddy’s Run outside Cincinnati; up in Northeast Ohio, where volunteers have been staking the Maumee River. And recently, teams at the Ohio River Foundation (ORF) have been using Black and Sandbar Willow to keep Twin Creek, a tributary of the Great Miami River, flowing soundly.

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