HARBINGERS of spring and harbingers of autumn too, poplar trees are a stately delight even during the winter months when they stand tall and bare with their silvered-white trunks and branches etched against the sky.

Populus alba — white poplar in English and known as safeda in both Urdu and Punjabi, is a member of the salicaceae family of plants, as is its cousin, the willow, and grows, both wild and cultivated in Balochistan, the Kurram Agency, Chitral, Swat, Gilgit and the Murree Hills as populous ciliata or palach flas in Punjabi and pahari pipal in Urdu and, for the uninitiated, it can be next to impossible to tell the two species apart.

Averaging 15 to 16 metres tall, usually with very straight trunks, these trees literally smothered in ‘catkins’ during the early spring and just a puff of wind sends the golden pollen from these dangling flower bracts sifting through the air to coat everything around with a sneeze-inducing, gilded, golden radiance.

These catkins are followed, in early summer, by masses and masses of fluffy white seeds which float around, just like wispy cotton wool, for quite a distance and, depending on weather and soil conditions, baby trees which germinate from this can pop up in the most unexpected of places.

Poplar leaves are shaped quite like a heart but are broader at the top and come to a tapered point. When the leaves of these deciduous trees — this means that they shed their leaves in the autumn — first open in early spring and after their catkins have finished, they are a beautifully bright, light golden green which, as they age, turn to a deeper green with a golden shimmer that catches the sunlight when they dance and flutter in the breeze.

When temperatures begin to drop during late autumn, the leaves slowly but surely transform themselves into a pure yellow-gold before, when night turn very cold, cascading down to cover the ground and provide food and shelter for all manner of fascinating creepy crawlies. And then, over the winter, this golden carpet changes colour once more, this time to brown as it is, over time, absorbed into the earth as food for the very trees from which the leaves fell.

These trees are very fast growing and are regularly used as firewood and in the manufacture of matchsticks. Luckily, from an environmental viewpoint, when a poplar tree is cut down, as long as the stump is left in the ground, it usually re-grows but in doing this, it will send up a number of new shoots to form a ‘clump’ rather than just a single trunk like the original.

Like all trees, poplars work hard purifying the air for humans to breathe and, also like all trees, deserve all the respect they can get.