DO NOT GO GENTLE
Dying needles of the tamarack tree provide a glorious burst of fall colour as they say goodbye,
“I’m very worried,” I told my neighbour. “I think all my trees are dying.”
It happened in rural Quebec, decades ago, one cold morning in November. I had recently, with great excitement, bought my first home there — a dilapidated wooden shack, with half an acre of land, containing a clump of splendid evergreens. Yet those trees were suddenly making me very agitated. Their needles had started to turn yellow and they were falling, in great handfuls, to the ground.
“Could the problem be acid rain — or some other kind of pollution?” I asked anxiously. (Everyone was preoccupied with acid rain back then.)
My neighbour seemed puzzled, and glanced over at my trees. He was a retired farmer, whom I always respectfully addressed as “Monsieur Poissant,” never by his first name, Hector, and he’d lived in the area all his life. It wasn’t the first time he’d been quizzed about some aspect of rural living by the naive trans- planted city girl who’d moved in next door.
After a pause, he told me gently: “Mais non, ma petite, don’t worry. Those trees are tamaracks. It’s what they do in fall.”
So they do. This was back in the late 1970s, shortly after I’d emigrated to Canada, when my knowledge of trees — all trees — was almost non-existent. I’m more familiar now with the curious seasonal behaviour of the “evergreen that isn’t really an evergreen” — the one we call the tamarack.
And it certainly seems determined to confuse us. During the spring and summer, the tamarack (Latin name: Larix laricina) has the Christmas tree appearance of a spruce or a pine. Yet come fall, that similarity vanishes. It’s one of the world’s only conifers (the collective name for these kinds of trees) which is deciduous — that is, it loses all its green growth, becoming as bare as maples and oaks do, when winter is on the way.
Yet what a glorious burst of colour those dying needles provide en route to their inevitable demise. Although crimson maples and oaks get all the oohs and aahs from us in fall, I’m always bowled over by the pure, pyramidal beauty of tamaracks.
The needles turn an acid yellow first, then gradually shift over to orange. Finally, they become like flaming torches — so luminous and brilliant, they can take your breath away. In fact, if a clump of tamaracks is growing in woodland among dark green spruce and the grey branches of deciduous trees that have lost all their leaves (a habitat they like), it can seem as if the wood has caught fire, the colour is so intense.
In Europe, they call this tree the larch and it’s often planted in public gardens — and by gardeners who have plenty of space. (They grow very tall and wide.) But over here, the tamarack is mostly limited to the wild. We tend to treat it dismissively as a nonentity tree, whose only purpose is to be cut down and turned into something useful.
Too bad. Perhaps the name has something to do with that image. Tamarack is an Algonquin word meaning “wood to make snowshoes with” — hardly a ringing endorsement of its esthetic qualities.
Yet back in Quebec, reassured by my elderly neighbour that my tamaracks were in fine fettle, I remember feeling cheered by their startling brilliance every time I arrived home from my job in Montreal. And when the needles had all fallen off the trees, it felt like walking on a soft, luxurious carpet of gold, until the snow arrived to cover everything.
So during October or November, make a point of noticing the tamaracks. They’re an exquisite — but underrated — pleasure of autumn. Clarification: Vineland Research Station has asked me to point out that their research is into Asian and Indian varieties of eggplant, not Italian eggplant. This was not made clear in my column last week.