It can be hard to find beauty in the November landscape. The dreariness of gray dominates the color scheme, with the tiny, red berries of various shrubs and the crisp, brown leaves of the beech as the only accents left after fall.

Although beech trees often hang on to their central core of leaves throughout the winter months, those tiny, red fruits of the rose, winterberry and barberry slowly disappear over time, providing food to birds or falling off from natural decay. The only color left is the backbone of the Maine landscape – the evergreens.

Evergreens are our reminder that life goes on through the most bleak periods. For centuries, trees that stay green during winter have been used to mark the solstice, with their cheery needles a symbol of enduring life.

“Conifer” is a term some people use to describe evergreens, but not all conifers are technically evergreen, and not all evergreens are technically conifers. Conifers are cone-bearing trees, and although the majority of those species are evergreen, our native tamarack (or hackamatack, many New Englanders call it) sheds its needles in autumn. If you have conifers in your yard, you most likely see squirrels and chipmunks busy beneath the branches, gleaning the seeds from cones, packing their jowls with their finds and running off to their nest to store the foodstuffs for winter.

Some evergreens are not conifers: Juniper and yew have brilliant, china-blue and red berries, respectively. These berries are an important food source for birds, which return the favor to the evergreens by dispersing the seed, thereby helping to perpetuate the species.

True evergreens do sometimes display some natural leaf shed in fall. A fraction of the needles of the pine, for example, turn yellow and shed during the autumn months. This generally isn’t a sign that the tree is in distress – it signals a natural replenishment of leaves. Many of these fallen needles are an important construction material for birds and small critters when they build their nests.

Evergreens also provide important shelter for native birds over the winter. On the coldest days and nights of winter, the needles of the pine, spruce, fir and hemlock buffer woodland creatures from the blustery winds and freezing cold.

Good Nature Publishing in Seattle, Wash., has a beautiful poster which features eastern native conifers of the United States. “Conifers are masters at thriving on difficult terrain: soils too poor, rocky, dry or wet for most other trees,” the poster reads. “Many depend on fire or clearing to expose the bare soil they need to germinate their seeds.”

I recently walked through a woodlot that was selectively cut two years ago. I was pleased and somewhat amazed to see the rapid regeneration of white pine across the 40 or so acres of mixed hard- and softwood trees. Many small seedlings representing a wide range of tree species were emerging, but none so vigorous as white pine. Thigh-high seedlings grew in dense clusters, thriving in the sunlight that streamed through to the forest floor from the newly opened tree canopy above.

The cutting of more mature trees clearly illustrated the poster’s point that thoughtful harvesting is good for evergreen renewal.

Diana George Chapin is the NEWS garden columnist. Send horticulture questions to Gardening Questions, RR1, Box 2120, Montville 04941, or e-mail them to dianagc@ctel.net. Selected questions will be answered in future columns. Include name, address and telephone number. Good Nature Publishing’s poster might interest those evergreen enthusiasts on your holiday gift-giving list. It is available for $14.99 or $25.00 laminated. To order, visit their Web site at www.goodnaturepublishing.com, call 800-631-3086, or write to: 1904 Third Ave, Ste. 415, Seattle, WA 98101.