CHRIS KOENIG reflects on the loss of the 'iconic trees of Oxfordshire', the willows on Osney Island

A butterfly flutters its wings in China and the weather changes in Europe. So runs the Chaos Theory, first adumbrated in the 1970s by Conrad Lorenz.

Last week we heard of a slick of plastic the size of Texas floating about in the North Pacific; then of the axing of willows on Oxford's Osney Island. Could the two be connected?

Well, yes, because plastic has replaced many of the uses to which the product of pollarded willows - and there are about 300 varieties - were for centuries put: the ubiquitous plastic bag, for instance, has replaced the basket.

In other words the willow, described as the "iconic tree of Oxfordshire" by John Thompson, former Oxford City Council landscape architect, has become largely redundant as a supplier of sustainable raw material.

True, shopping baskets were woven from ossier willows, and the trees felled in Osney were crack willows, but, until very recently, crack willows too were used to make wickerwork objects such as fences, or ramparts for shoring up the river bank, or the lath between floors in houses, or the eel traps (known as bucks in old Oxfordshire jargon) depicted in John Tenniel's drawing of Godstow weir in Alice in Wonderland.

Indeed willows were essential for people living in a county rich in rivers such as Oxfordshire. The Rev Edward Stone, of Chipping Norton, was the first to note, in 1760, that the bark of the white willow eased fever and headache.

Willow is still used to produce aspirin, and, of course, cricket bats, but until as late as the 1950s almost every part of pollarded willow was used for something: the bark for aspirin, the leaves for animal fodder, the sticks for wickerwork.

And here is the wonder of the thing: there was always more raw material where that came from. When your basket wore out you simply left it to compost slowly away somewhere while you went round with a smart new one, perhaps modelled on the Banbury Cake basket, still on view in Banbury Museum, and specially made for carting those delicacies about.

Another island, this time on the Thame, near Dorchester, called the Hurst Water Meadow and acquired as a nature reserve by local people in 1996, provides a beautiful insight into the management of willows of many varieties. Here the trustees of the charity, in marked contrast to Oxford City Council in Osney, have pollarded old crack willows to keep them safe but have preserved them because they look good.

St Frideswide herself, 7th-century patron saint and founder of Oxford, would probably have seen willows at Osney when she rowed up the Thames from Binsey to establish her nunnery where Christ Church now stands, a river excursion depicted in a wood carving by Alice Liddell (Alice in Wonderland) on view in the Victorian church bearing her name just across the river from Osney.

Certainly Alice herself would have seen them when she and her sisters made much the same expedition in reverse to Godstow on that Golden Afternoon in July 1862 when she first heard Lewis Carroll tell of her adventures.

And that other great Oxford writer, Kenneth Graham, author of The Wind in the Willows, must have been turning in his grave at St Cross Church, Holywell, when those willows in Osney were destroyed. The gnarled roots of willows provide habitat for that now rare creature the water vole, which the trustees of the Hurst Water Meadow are trying to attract back. And plantations of ossiers were actually known as holts. They made good lying up places for otters.

As for that slick of plastic. Could it be affecting the breeding grounds of the eels caught in Godstow which prompted Carroll to write of Old Father William and of Alice's need for art lessons in "drawling, stretching and fainting in coils".