It is said that Lin Daiyu pulled out a weeping willow tree. So what kind of willow tree did she pull out?

You may ask, Lin Daiyu was born weak and suffered from tuberculosis... Yes, I understand the principle , but what kind of willow tree did Lin Daiyu pull out?

[Editor's note: "Lin Daiyu uproots a weeping willow tree" is a joke that went viral on the Internet a few years ago. As for why it became popular... there is no reason. Just imagine the scene!]

Just ask if it's shocking or not | Sina Weibo: @画画-Q

What kind of willow can be pulled out?

People who seek a sense of reality in fictional stories must have something wrong with their brains. When we examine plants that appear in ancient books (wait, what kind of ancient books are these), we will inevitably encounter a lack of morphological descriptions, so geographical distribution becomes the focus of our consideration.

In the original text of the first 80 chapters of "Dream of Red Mansions", Lin Daiyu lived in the Lin family and the Jia family, living a "two-point one-line" life. There is no doubt that the Lin family is in Gusu (now Suzhou), and the location of the Jia family is a little drifting. The author Cao Xueqin deliberately blurred the background of the times, which made the Jia family in the "capital" possibly in Beijing or Nanjing. It doesn't matter, we are not discussing literature here, but a willow tree, Suzhou , Nanjing and Beijing can be considered!

As for why the "first line" is considered, it is because Daiyu took the long water route to Beijing twice, rather than the more than three hours of high-speed rail from Suzhou North to Beijing South. There are too many stories that can happen along the way. This waterway, needless to say, is the famous Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal . The Grand Canal is divided into seven sections, starting from Hangzhou, Zhejiang in the south, passing through Jiangsu, Henan, Shandong, Hebei, Tianjin, and finally reaching Beijing Tonghui River. Daiyu can easily board a ship from Suzhou to Beijing, as for Nanjing... You can consider getting off the ship in Zhenjiang, and it will take only 20 minutes by high-speed rail to get there. (Huh)

Grand Canal Historic Waterway | Groverlynn / wiki commons

Now that we have determined the geographical location we need to investigate, the next step is to determine the range of plants. Speaking of "weeping willows", the first thing that comes to mind is the genus Salix . What are the genus Salix plants in these three points? In order to be rigorous (actually because I don't have the money to buy provincial annals), I selected specimen records from different regions in the China Digital Herbarium (CVH) for analysis.

Affected by human activities, the native willow plants in Suzhou and Nanjing are almost identical. We can find six species : Salix matsudana, Salix weepingii, Salix purpureus, Salix nanjingensis, Salix nanchuanensis and Salix jiujiu. In Beijing, after excluding the mountains in the west and north, we can find Salix matsudana, Salix weepingii, Salix wormwood and Salix basketii. Along the Grand Canal, although it passes through Shandong and Hebei provinces, there are only three species: Salix matsudana, Salix weepingii and Salix basketii.

In summary, there are eight species of willow plants that Lin Daiyu may have pulled up, listed below:

Which willow is easiest to pull out?

While I counted the species of willows that appeared in CVH, I also counted the number of specimens of each species . If we roughly equate the frequency of specimens with the frequency of species, we can easily calculate which willow tree Lin Daiyu is most likely to pull up - if she is not picky .

As expected, the easiest tree to pull out is still the poplar, which is exactly the same as the one that Lu Tijie picked. In the area we surveyed, the abundance of poplar is about 45%, basically one in every two trees, followed by weeping willow and purple willow, accounting for 31% and 12% respectively. The most difficult tree to pull out should be Nanjing willow. Among all the specimens, the proportion of Nanjing willow is just over 1%, which is literally "one in a hundred".

There is still controversy over the taxonomic status of Salix matsudana and Salix babylonica. If they are ever merged... | Steven Severinghaus / flickr.com

But we have to say that once the weeping willow and the poplar tree grow up, they can be trees about 18 meters tall, as tall as a six-story building . Not to mention uprooting them, even if you cut them down and put them on the ground, even if you replace Lu Zhishen, it is difficult to move them. So we have to consider the size of the willow tree. Is there a more slender one?

The answer is: Of course there is. In fact, except for the three most common willows, namely, Salix matsudana, Salix nigra and Salix purpurogeni, which are trees, the remaining willows can be shrubs, and the tallest is a small tree. The shortest is Salix dasyphylla , which is a small shrub that grows near water . When Lin Daiyu was getting off the boat, she accidentally slipped and grabbed a branch of Salix dasyphylla to maintain her balance in a panic. The achievement of "pulling a weeping willow" was lit up with a "ding" sound!

A set of high-resolution photos of Willow of the Astragalus family | He L et al. (2019) PhytoKeys 131 :27-35

Oh, and by the way, the specific epithet of Willow of Ochre, “suchowensis”, comes from Daiyu’s hometown, Suzhou .

Can it be any simpler?

But, that is Lin Daiyu who fell from the sky, is the shrub still too difficult? Don't worry, although we really can't find a better one in the genus Willow, we might as well find some plants with "willow" in their names as substitutes.

First, let's rule out some names that are too far-fetched , such as Willow Leaf XX (including but not limited to Willow Leaf Whitehead, Willow Leaf Achyranthes bidentata, Willow Leaf Polygonum, Willow Leaf Puerariae, etc.). These just mean that their leaves are lanceolate, and it is difficult to directly link them with "weeping willow". (Although we have begun to lose our moral principles, we still need to pretend that we are very principled!)

Then we searched the CVH specimen library as we did before, and found... the 8-meter-tall Salix paeoniae**(? ) , the 30-meter-tall Cyclocarya paliurus (??) , and the 70-meter-tall Cryptomeria fortunei (???)**.

Cryptomeria melongena probably looks like this (note the little man in the picture), and it seems that Lin Daiyu is coming towards me with a willow tree as thick as a bowl... | Chris 73 / Wiki Commons

Sorry, I accidentally went in the wrong direction. Look for it in Xiaoli. At least we still have the 1.5-meter-tall creeping shrub Periploca spp., and several species of herbaceous willow herb! (Although, willow herb also fits the general pattern of "willow leaf XX", which makes people feel a little guilty...)

But I have to say that the three plants of the Onagraceae family - Epilobium, Epilobium longifolium and Epilobium pseudo-epipedum - are all excellent candidates . They are all herbaceous plants, growing near water so their roots are shallow, and they all have obvious main stems, making them easy to pull out. By the way, their flowers are also a little bit beautiful.

Willowherb flowers | Jon Peli Oleaga Olabarria / wikimedia commons

If these three are to be compared, we will have to distinguish them from the feel or even smaller details. Both Epilobium and Long-seeded Epilobium are densely covered with soft hairs and glandular hairs, and feel rough, which is obviously not what Lin Daiyu likes; while Pseudo-epiped stems are smooth, hairless or slightly pubescent, which gives Pseudo-epiped a point extra!

The flowers of false willow are less colorful, but still much better than the catkins of real willows! | Show ryu / wikimedia commons

What is more decisive is that both epilobium and long-seeded epilobium are perennial plants with stronger roots, while false epilobium is an annual plant. Lin Daiyu entered the Jia Mansion twice in autumn and winter. Imagine that Lin Daiyu walked off the boat and looked at the bleak scene by the canal thoughtfully. Finally, she couldn't help but picked up a broken branch and two dead leaves ... Yes, it was false epilobium, it was "willow"!

It is not known whether Daiyu later stopped Baoyu from plucking the withered lotus in order to "leave the withered lotus to listen to the sound of rain" or because " I am familiar with this, let me do it ."

Extra

Although Lin Daiyu had easily uprooted the "weeping willow", our research actually still has a small loophole - there is no saying that she uprooted the tree in this life ?

Daiyu's previous life was a red pearl fairy grass that was born by the Sansheng Stone on the bank of the Ling River in the west. "Jiang" means "dark red", "Jiangzhu" should refer to "dark red round fruit", and "Jiangzhu fairy grass" is " a perennial herb with dark red round fruit ", which is very intuitive. As for its habitat, it is more interesting: "west", "riverside", "stoneside", these keywords point to the southwestern mountainous area with abundant water resources, that is, the Himalaya-Hengduan Mountain area.

Based on the above morphological and phytogeographic evidence, we can preliminarily determine that the red pearl fairy grass should be the peach seven on the gravel beach , a perennial herb of the Berberidaceae family. They are 20-50 cm tall and grow under forests, forest edge wetlands, shrubs or grass in the western mountainous areas. The light pink flowers are very beautiful and the fruits are also very cute.

Flowers of Taoerqi | Kerry Woods / flickr.com

Tao Er Qi's "Jiangzhu" | Andy king50 / wiki commons

However, no matter how carefully the attendant Shen Ying irrigated and cultivated it, the "Jiangzhu Immortal Grass" was only half a meter tall at most. The only species she could bully were probably the species of the Qinghai-Tibet Paddy Willow Group, which are common in the high altitudes of the southwestern mountainous areas, such as the Qinghai-Tibet Paddy Willow.

Tibetan willow in the cracks of rocks｜ghislain118 / wiki commons

The Qinghai-Tibetan Willow is a very short tree. The description of this group in the Flora is "a cushion-shaped shrub with a creeping trunk" and "the branches of the current year are reddish brown, obliquely ascending, and several centimeters high ." In theory, this is indeed a height that Daiyu (Prototype) can handle. But don't be greedy and pull down the "weeping willow" completely. After all, if the creeping branches of the Qinghai-Tibetan Willow are really erected, they are still much taller than Taoerqi.

Strictly speaking, this article is not a sufficiently rigorous research, because... the content being researched is too nonsensical. The author and editor have taken many actions to make the article more entertaining, so please do not regard the conclusion of this article as a rigorous scientific conclusion!

In addition, the morphological classification of the genus Salix is ​​not very good, and there are still many problems to be solved. At present, there is not even a classification system that satisfies everyone. In order to facilitate the screening of records, the article uses a classification system consistent with CVH. There may be some species that are merged or scattered in another set or multiple sets of systems. Please be aware of this!

As for how outrageous the story of "Lin Daiyu plucking a weeping willow tree" is, let's put it this way: we asked AI to draw "Lin Daiyu plucking a weeping willow tree". This is the homework that AI handed in...

Author: 媗媗

Editor: Old Cat

The title image comes from Sina Weibo @画画-Q, the copyright belongs to the original author

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

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