Salix cheilophila

Salix cheilophila is a shrub or small tree up to 5 meters high with gray-black or red-black branches that are initially tomentose and then bald. The buds are hairy shaggy. The leaves have a very short stem. The leaf blade is linear, linear-wrong-lanceolate or wrongly lanceolate, 2.5 to 3.5 seldom up to 6 centimeters long and 3 to 5 seldom 10 millimeters wide, pointed or pointed, with a narrowed or seldom blunt base and serrated glandularly towards the tip of the leaf Leaf margin. The top is green and finely haired, the underside white-gray and densely hairy silky. The male inflorescences are 1.5 to 2.5 centimeters long and 3 to 4 millimeters in diameter, almost sitting catkins with two to three leaves at the base. The bracts are obovate-oblong, with a blunt or edged tip and a downy, hairy base. Male flowers have a narrow, elongated, rarely bilobed nectar gland. The two stamens are completely grown together and bare, the anthers are yellow and four-fold. The female catkins are up to 2.5 inches long. The bracts are more or less round. Female flowers have a narrow, elongated nectar gland. The ovaryis ovate to ovoid-cylindrical, densely hairy or glabrous, sessile or with short stalk. The scar is short. Capsules about 3 millimeters long are formed as fruits. Salix cheilophila flowers from April to May when the leaves shoot, the fruits ripen in May.

The natural range is in the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Hebei, Henan, in Inner Mongolia, in Ningxia, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, and in Tibet along rivers at altitudes of 700 to 3000 meters.