What looks like a tiny pine cone on a willow branch is actually a fascinating natural phenomenon: a willow pine cone gall, formed by a tiny insect! Nature truly has endless surprises.
The Weird and Wonderful Pine Cone Willow Gall
Have you ever stumbled across something in nature that just made you stop and say, “What is that?” We recently had one of those moments, and it turned into a fascinating learning experience. This strange, pine cone-like structure is called a pine cone willow gall.
It’s actually not a pine cone at all, but a growth on a willow tree, caused by a tiny insect called a gall midge. The midge lays an egg on the willow stem, and the hatching larva secretes chemicals that make the willow create this multi-layered structure, a cozy and protective home for the larva as it develops.
This discovery is especially meaningful to us. Our pilot arts incubator program in 2022, seeded with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse, was already designed to explore the arts through land-based activities. However, that summer, our community recreation complex flooded, leaving us without our usual indoor space. This meant that while we were already on the land, we ended up having to do almost all our program activities entirely outdoors. Spending so much time outside, truly immersed, made us realize how much we didn’t know about the local and traditional plants often growing “right in our own backyards.”
Since then, we’ve really enjoyed taking a closer look at the world around us through the lens of both art and discovery, like finding this intriguing pine cone willow gall. So each summer, we always make an extra effort to capture and document the many plants that many of us don’t know about.
