European Larch
Larch flowers. The yellow flowers are male, the pink female.
Up on the moor in winter, it looks like patches of trees haven't survived the snow. Plantation stands are deep green against the white but parts of them are sickly brown, like a Christmas tree left on the pavement in January.
R. A. Staig once wrote that, in winter, larch
has a particularly desolate appearance, more like that of death than sleep. But in spring there is no tree that awakens, in its vivid emerald robing, to a life more blithe and buoyant.
A few months later, I got to appreciate the larch's vivid buoyancy for myself when I spotted curious pink and green flowers on their branches.
A female larch flower.
The yellowy green oval-shaped flowers are male, and produce pollen. The hot pink flowers are female and eventually grow and harden into seed-bearing cones.
The flowers are, says Staig,
erect by a manifest effort on the sides of the pendent branchlets. These are what Tennyson refers to as the "rosy plumelets" of the Larch.
The reference is to Tennyson's In Memoriam, a poem I'm particularly fond of because it was written in memory of Arthur Hallam, a poet who, like Tennyson, studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in whose rooms I lived in my third year there. The verse is XCI:
When rosy plumelets tuft the larch,
And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
Or underneath the barren bush
Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;
Come, wear the form by which I know
Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
The hope of unaccomplish'd years
Be large and lucid round thy brow.
When summer's hourly-mellowing change
May breathe, with many roses sweet,
Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
That ripple round the lonely grange;
Come: not in watches of the night,
But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
Come, beauteous in thine after form,
And like a finer light in light.
Larch in spring inspires Tennyson to seek his lost friend.
Tennyson asks Hallam's spirit to visit him when the larch flowers, and perhaps the romantic, magical nature of these flowers prompted that feeling of connection with his lost friend.
Maybe, upon seeing such a vibrant plumelet tuft from a forlorn branch, he was reminded that life, in all its glory, continues gently on and that, in a world so full of beauty and enchantment, he must surely stand a chance of seeing his friend again.
Larch is unlike other conifers in many ways. They drop their needles in winter, their needles are soft, they cast little shade, and their cones remain on their branches for years after releasing their seeds.
They might look downtrodden in winter, but in spring they put on a show, verdant bundles of new needles spring from the brown branches alongside the pink and green flowers and previous years' cones.
It seems to happen all at once, an awakening.
Noticing larch flowers seems to coincide with daylight savings, whether because that's when they emerge or because that's when they days are long enough to get out more, and so I feel an affinity with the larch: now is the time for action, growth, colour.
The larch signals clearly: winter is over. Hibernation is finished. We are no longer sleeping; it's time to create.
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