Beauty of larches ascending

Ihave just finished writing a book about autumn. It was a vaguely disconcerting process, to spend the whole winter and the first stirrings of spring with my mindset still locked into autumn. On the other hand, last autumn was lovely and the winter and the early spring were rubbish, so autumn was quite a nice place for me to be, at least in my head.

But to emerge blinking into the brightening, lengthening, loudening light of mid-spring is to be jarred into an awareness of things happening behind my back.

Specifically, the larches have started to grow green again, and there are few visual cues that portend the advancement of spring more elegantly than the greening of larches.

Infidels?

I know there are infidels out there who think that the European larch is an incomer and has no place in our landscape and should suffer wellmerited oblivion along with our upstart beavers.

Well, the larch has been here as long as the beaver has not, so about 400 years, which is good enough for me.

The Crumleys have only been here about 180 years, and it is a brave and foolish man who tells me to my face that I am not a native. But I digress. Less than two weeks ago, I was still writing the final pages of the book, and as it is chronological (as well as submerging into adventures in old autumns from time to time), I was also writing the final days of autumn.

Most mornings, when I am at home, the walk between my house and the paper shop and the café where I read the papers passes a row of 10 larch trees. It is not the shortest route but it’s the only one with a row of larch trees, which is why I choose it as often as not.

It had been November before they started to turn, and the middle of that month before the storms found a way through the steeply sheltering wooded bank that spares them from the worst onslaughts.

By then, autumn had slipped across that watershed that divides Indian summer from winter-in-waiting.

Suddenly there was snow on the mountains and the biggest larch had shed half of its needles. The effect was to reveal its true elegance, the more elegant because it was dressed in softershaded seduction of a garment that now revealed more than it concealed.

Needles remained

The legacy of all late autumn storms is that softening of all their shades, cool fires wrought from shades of flame. The effect is nowhere more painterly than among the larches.

By the last week in November, the big larch was the only tree that still held needles and they were now the colour of old straw.

I had the slightly out-of-left-field notion of a beautiful woman with grey hair, and how, in the right circumstances, that can add elegance and dignity to beauty. Stop me if this is getting too poetic for you.

The thing is, I was writing about these end-of-autumn larches at a time when they had shrugged off winter and begun to embrace spring without me noticing, which is a little careless on my part.

So I was happily startled to catch the big larch in a certain slant of Sunday morning sunlight and to discover that it had begun to grow green.

It is that capacity to surprise that defines the end of the old season and the beginning of the new, a phenomenon as old as the earth and as global as oceans.

A New England writer I like, Donald Hall, wrote a beautiful little book called Seasons at Eagle Pond.

This observation is one with which I can readily identify:

“Ice leaves the lake one day when we do not notice; for weeks it has crept out from the shoreline, frayed from its muddy border, but when we gaze from the bridge’s center, the ice looks steady and unbroken still.

“Then it is suddenly gone, for it sinks to the bottom while we are never looking.”

Likewise, the greening of the larches. They go green while we are never looking and the last day of autumn has just evolved into the first day of spring.

It is a long time since our lives were necessarily wedded to the ebb and flow of the seasons, but for a nature writer, perhaps more than most people, their symbolism still inhabits the land.

I tend to look for bridges from one season to the next. They come in many guises, many landscapes.

This was Lismore, one old spring:

The Breath of Life: The island quiet rushed ashore, an intent tide that pushed inland, uphill, until it lay in the hushed folds of small fields, spent

in a final silence where it gleaned like a questing dove thin stalks it wove into a nest

of soundlessness, that felt so close to death and yet its very breath was life itself.

The big larch was the only tree that still held needles