The Tamarac is the one exception to the conifer rule, as is evident at this time of year.
Welcome to November! Some people think it’s dreary, but I think our eleventh month has a lot to offer. The slanting light is especially beautiful now. And even though most of our maples, birches, and sumacs have dropped their leaves, there’s still a lot of color left in the landscape.
The tamarack, for example, really gets a chance to shine now. Late autumn is when it turns a startling golden yellow. Why startling? Well, the tamarack, also known as the American larch, is the exception to the rule among conifers — it sheds its needles each fall. Unlike it’s close cousins, the pine, spruces, and firs that keep theirs year-round — like proper evergreens are supposed to!
If you drive along Turkey Pond in Concord at this time of year, you can see a stand of larch blazing away against the darker background of the lake edge. These pointy trees don’t mind getting their feet wet and typically thrive in boggy areas. They aren’t super common in southern New Hampshire, but the further north you go, the more tamaracks you’ll find. It’s also a popular tree in many parts of the west where western larch often light up acres at a time each fall.
A study in contrasts, the larch can thrive in almost any type of soil and is incredibly cold tolerant, but cannot take being shaded by other trees — at all. That’s just another way this species ensures that it stands out from the crowd, I guess.
If you see a larch in winter, with its branches all bare and studded with its tiny cones, you might easily think it’s dead. But come spring, it will sprout its usual clusters of bright green needles to start another season of its unusual life.
