The ubiquity, variety, and relatively short lifespan (around 150 years) of poplars has not always made them the most enchanting of trees in the plant kingdom, but they have played a supporting role in medicine, agriculture, and the arts since antiquity. Brewing the buds is just one element of myriad North American Indigenous uses for poplars. The ethnobotanist Erna Gunther, in Ethnobotany of Western Washington, records the Squaxin boiling the bark of P. trichocarpa “for a gargle to cure a sore throat” and soaking the bruised leaves in water as an antiseptic on cuts; the Klallam using the buds for an eye wash; and the Quinault using the “bark at the surface of the ground to make an infusion for the relief of tuberculosis.” Noted ethnobiologist Nancy J. Turner has found names for P. balsamifera (commonly known as balsam poplar) in more than fifty Indigenous languages and major dialects of northwestern North America, a testament to its ubiquity and versatility as medicine, fuel, canoe material, and even as food (the inner bark).
European mentions of poplars stretch back into antiquity, typically referring to white poplars (P. alba) and black or Lombardy poplars. White poplars were associated with Hercules because of the stark contrast between the two sides of the leaf—one side darkened by the heat of Hades and the other side bleached silver by his sweat while performing his fabled labors. The earliest European mentions of its medicinal uses appear to be in Hieronymous Bock’s Kreüterbuch (1565) and John Gerard’s Herball (1597), where, in addition to uses including treatment for sciatica, gout, and ear pain, Gerard reports that “the same barke is also reported to make a woman barren, if it be drunke with the kidney of a Mule” and that the “trembling” name is “after the French name, considering it is the matter whereof womens toongs were made […] which seldome cease wagging.”
Poplars, notable for their rapid growth and rather vertical architecture, were frequently planted as windbreaks. “Like ambition its one desire seems to be to excel its fellows and flaunt in the breeze far above their heads,” wrote the turn-of-the-century botanist Charles Henry Wilson. “Like sentinels they stand and dare both the laws of gravity and the fury of storms.” When planted in a row, this growth habit can create a striking allée effect or points of interest in an open landscape—Claude Monet was so struck by one such planting by the Epte River that he devoted a series of paintings to studying the play of light and shadows on the grove across several seasons, going so far as to purchase the row of trees when they were in danger of being cleared before he had finished memorializing them.