Larches
  
  
 Sentinel elders
 of boreal forests,
 they know how to spin 
 soft green into gold,
  
 brew in their bodies
 bright tannins to stain
 that bitter tea 
 of their shining season, 
  
 then release themselves, 
 let everything drop
 when arctic cold
 drops in again.
  
 Naked as spears, 
 larches lift our eyes
 to the stark beauty
 of winter skies.
  
 From carpets of needles
 and shadows, they pierce
 the clouds each day.
 All night they point the way
  
 toward Arcturus,
 our northern springtime
 star, its yellow light heralding
 renewed green.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz 

The anomalous beauty of the larch fascinates me. It is a conifer but not an evergreen. Its heart wood is salmon-pink. It is the hardest of the soft woods, and its small cones resemble roses or lilies. And the larch is very long-lived compared to our human span, often 600 years old, with documented trees standing a thousand years. Larches are most striking in October but I like to think of them now, in spring, spinning nutrients from the soil into fresh green needles, soft pink cones filled with seed.