Eastern Larch
- Larry Ely
- 20 hours ago
- 3 min read
Seeing the Forest Through its Trees — Part VIII
By Larry Ely
“In winter it is the deadest looking vegetation on the globe…when spring comes to her Northwoods…these same trees that one thought were but ‘crisps’ begin…
to put forth an unexpected subtle bloom.”
-Donald Culross Peattie
The larch, also commonly known as tamarack or hackmatack, is the only member of our region’s coniferous pinaceae family often described as evergreens that is in fact not “evergreen.”
Tamarack, an Algonquin word for “wood used for snowshoes,” is the most common name used in our region. It loses needles in late fall after turning a “smoky gold” as described by Aldo Leopold. The naked branches of winter add feathery, light green needles in May, and the new needles on the spurs of older branches are arranged in distinctive clusters with single needles on long new shoots. Even with needles present, tamarack provides little shade with its fine, sparsely-spaced needles, and an understory of shrubs might develop even under a pure stand. Unlike other softwoods, it is ill-suited as winter cover for deer and other mammals or birds.
Oval, winged seeds are produced within small egg-shaped cones that remain on the tree for some years and may be consumed by red squirrels and a few seed-eating birds such as pine siskins. While mice, voles, and shrews also consume seeds from the ground, the tree is not an important dietary component for wildlife. Snowshoe hare feed on its twigs and rough and scaly bark while porcupines feed on the inner bark and moose and deer avoid it and find it unpalatable as browse.
Most often found on cool swampy sites in association with black spruce and fir, tamaracks also grow on well drained soils and were planted throughout our region by paper companies in the late 1900s for reforestation of old fields. One of those straight-row plantations is on MLT’s Shelburne Riverlands parcel south of the Androscoggin River, with another on the north side of the river in Gilead. The poorly drained soils of old fields along the river are perfect for tamarack. Scott Paper Company developed hybrids between native larch and exotic European and Japanese larch in the 1960s, and those plantations are most likely not native but do grow faster and are better suited to pulp production.
While less common than in northern Maine, native stands and individual trees are still present in our mixed forests. Being cold hardy to minus 85 degrees, tamarack has the largest range of trees in North America, extending north to the arctic circle. It is fairly intolerant of shade and not a large tree, generally reaching only 50 to 60 feet with a 20-inch diameter at its oldest. Tamarack self-prunes its lower branches as it matures. It is able to persist in pure stands as lightly filtered sunlight reaches the forest floor. Nearly as rot resistant as cedar, its wood has been used for fence-posts and its larger roots fashioned into “knees” for shipbuilding and its fine roots for tying birch bark canoes. AMC still uses tamarack for its bog bridges on our mountain trails.
This is part of a continuing series looking at the life of the common trees in our Mahoosuc Mountain Region.