Western larches are stately trees, soaring 90 to nearly 200 feet tall, with branches that spill out in a neat cascade from a narrow crown. While the majority of conifers are evergreen — retaining ...
Every year, thousands of Calgarians flock to the mountains in search of golden larches. The unusual trees, which see their needles turn yellow in autumn, create an especially striking contrast against ...
There is a group of evergreens whose members don’t fully fit the typical mold of conifers and must have been a brainteaser for the early botanists to name and classify. Case in point, the larch tree ...
It’s the perfect time to pay a visit to the Metolius Preserve. When I visited the Larch Trails last weekend, the Western larch trees were a shocking vibrant hue of yellow. During points of the ...
Interior Alaskan forests have only six native tree species: white spruce, black spruce, quaking aspen, balsam poplar, larch (tamarack) and paper birch. Northern Canadian forests have all of those, plus jack pine, balsam fir and lodgepole pine. Since northern Canada and interior Alaska share the same grueling climate and extremes of daylength, why are the Canadian tree species absent from ...
It is common for people in interior Alaska and corresponding areas of northwestern Canada to use the name cottonwood when referring to one widespread variety of deciduous tree.
A tree's age can be easily determined by counting its growth rings, as any Boy or Girl Scout knows. Annually, the tree adds new layers of wood which thicken during the growing season and thin during the winter. These annual growth rings are easily discernible (and countable) in cross-sections of the tree's trunk. In good growing years, when sunlight and rainfall are plentiful, the growth rings ...