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Larch is the conifer that refuses to behave like one. All winter it stands among the pines and spruces looking properly evergreen, and then, sometime in October, it turns butter-yellow and drops every needle it owns. For a fortnight a larch wood looks like a beech wood. By December it is as bare as an ash.
That annual vanishing act is why larch repays close watching. Its year is built from small, datable events: buds swelling on stubby short shoots, crimson "larch roses" in spring, the soft flush of needles in May, cones hardening through summer, gold in autumn. Learn the sequence and identifying larch stops being a puzzle.
Start in the depths of winter, when nothing else distracts you. A leafless larch shows its architecture: a strong straight trunk, branches that sweep out and then droop at the tips, and a great deal of fine, twiggy growth. The buds you want sit on short woody spurs lining the shoots, and those spurs are the key to the whole tree. Each one is a compressed shoot that will push a tuft of needles in spring, then leave a knobbly scar when they fall.
Cones linger far longer than needles do, so look for two generations on one branch: last year's cones, often still closed, and older ones opened into dry woody rosettes that shed their winged seed over winter.
Learn the bark now, too. European larch is grey-brown and fissured; Japanese larch is usually rougher, with more reddish-brown plates that flake. Where the two grow together, the difference is plain. By late February the spurs begin to swell, and by March the buds are visibly plump. In mild southern years, the first green shows before the month is out.
Larch flowers before it is in leaf, which suits anyone trying to see them. Male cones are small, yellow and clustered beneath the shoots, releasing pollen on a dry April day. Female cones, the ones that become woody, start as tiny upright structures on the upper side of the branches. On European larch they are usually deep crimson; on Japanese larch, pink-purple or green. Gardeners call them larch roses, and it is a fair description: for a fortnight the tree looks as though someone has glued small red buds to the twigs.
Then the needles arrive, pushing from the spurs in tufts, at first a fresh grassy green that darkens as the weeks pass. By late May the tree is fully clothed and often the brightest thing in a pine wood.
Timing shifts with latitude and altitude. Expect flowering in mid-April in southern England; in the Highlands it can be a month later, and a cold spring holds everything back.
Summer is when larch does its work and you get the chance to check details. Needles are full-length now, soft to the touch and held in those distinctive tufts, casting a light dappled shade rather than the heavy shadow of a spruce.
New cones develop through this period, green at first and often flushed with purple or red, then hardening and browning. They stand upright on the shoot, which is one of the quickest ways to separate larch from conifers whose cones dangle.
To tell European larch from Japanese larch at close range, count needles in a tuft. European larch usually carries around thirty to forty; Japanese larch tends to carry more, commonly forty or more. It is fiddly work, so choose a well-lit shoot and use a hand lens. Dunkeld larch, the hybrid first raised at Dunkeld in Perthshire and planted widely since, sits between the two and often grows faster than either.
Autumn colour in a conifer wood is a short, sharp event. Larch needles turn from green to yellow to a deep butter gold, then fall. In a good year the whole change takes about a fortnight, and the ground beneath ends up carpeted in soft rust-coloured needles.
The cones are finishing at the same time. They brown, the scales open, and small winged seeds spin out on the wind. Larch seed needs bare ground and light to germinate, which is why you find young trees on cleared ground, verges and old tracks rather than deep in shade.
Pick up a fallen branch for an easy confirmation of identity: needles attached in tufts rather than singly along the twig, and the twig dotted with woody spurs.
Bare larch is much easier to read. Look for the fine tracery of drooping branchlets, the knobbly spurs and cones still fixed to the branches, many nibbled by red squirrels after the seed. It is a good month for sketching and for photographing the same tree from the same spot each year. At a distance in a mixed wood, the only bare twiggy tree in a stand of evergreens is almost certainly a larch.
Pick one larch you can reach easily, ideally on a regular walk, and visit it every two or three weeks. Note the date the first needles break, when the roses show, when the colour turns. After a year or two you will have a personal calendar more accurate for your patch than any general guide, and you will start to see how much a cold spring or a warm autumn shifts everything.
If you are thinking of planting larch, give it light, reasonably free-draining soil and plenty of room, because it is a fast grower that wants to be a tall tree. Bear in mind that larch planting is restricted in parts of the UK because of Phytophthora ramorum, a disease that has affected Japanese larch badly. Check current guidance from the forestry authority for your area before buying, and ask a nursery what stock suits your site.
Finally, look closely at the cones. If the scales have wavy, pale-edged tips and no turned-back edge, you are probably looking at European larch. If the scale edges curl back noticeably, that is Japanese larch. It is the sort of detail that turns a pleasant afternoon walk into a proper record.
Photo: Andrey_and_Olesya / Pixabay
