Hardy tamarack is truly a conifer for all seasons

For me, a transplanted Southerner, the tamarack (Larix laricina) is the bald cypress of the north. Like the cypress swamps of South Carolina, tamarack bogs instill a sense of place – the Eastern larch is quintessentially Maine.

Like bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) and dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), tamarack is a tall (to 75 feet) deciduous conifer, dropping its needles in the fall, but not before they turn to gold. Nestled among somber spruce, patches of golden tamarack light up the North Woods in autumn. It occurred to me one late October afternoon, the low-angled sunlight reflected from tamarack on a New Hampshire hillside, that their golden hue was the color of the brass doorknobs in my old high school, the ones I polished every day after school for two weeks as punishment for cutting English.

In December I enjoy trudging through the snow with my students to visit tamarack in the winter landscape. The trees are stark narrow pyramids, trunks covered by a scaly red-brown bark. Thin naked twigs, loaded with the weight of last year’s small, dark brown cones and the short knobby spurs that will bear new leaves in spring, sway in the cold wind. After winter storms, the ground beneath the trees will be littered with broken twigs, an indication of their brittleness.

There are those who would describe as “unfavorable characteristics” the tendency of tamarack to drop cones and other “debris” on the ground, as well as its susceptibility to ice breakage. I do not view these as undesirable traits. It is ice that shapes old tamaracks into their unique and beautiful forms. And I have spent more than one blue-sky autumn afternoon collecting cones from the ground, stuffing pockets full of memories of magnificent old friends. This is the reason we plant trees. Or should be.

I return to these trees in spring, after the last snow melts, to enjoy the new leaves, soft and bright green, emerging in clusters of 10 to 20 needles from each short spur. I ask my students to think of any other leaf that matches the freshness of this color, knowing they cannot, and suggest that this bright green is a true harbinger of spring in Maine. As the year progresses, the needle color will darken to a deeper green and tamarack branches will support nests of great gray owls, black-backed woodpeckers, olive-sided flycatchers and other summer residents.

Accompanying the new leaves are the flowers, both male and female on each tree. The clusters of male flowers are bright yellow, nearly round, and last only long enough to shed pollen. The female flowers, small, bright purplish-red rosettes sitting erect on two-to-four-year-old branchlets, will develop into chestnut-brown cones by autumn, shedding seed welcomed by songbirds, particularly red crossbills, and by small rodents such as shrews, mice and red squirrels. The cones, about 1 half-inch long, persist on the tree for a full year after shedding seed so that you often find twigs carrying both current year’s cones and the old dark brown cones of the past year.

The fact that tamarack can thrive on the rock outcrops that surround our school is a tribute to its toughness. Preference for open sunny areas and resistance to salt, soil compaction, and extremes of soil moisture make this one of the best selections for stressful landscapes. It can tolerate a wide range of soils from heavy clay to wet sand, a soil pH from strongly acid to neutral, and has no serious insect or disease problems.

Tamarack seedlings grow among the spruce and firs that surround Marjorie’s garden. We clear space for them, thinking ahead to October afternoons together.

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