Forester's Diary: Can we have a memorial service for larch?

I was jolted into action by finding the most gorgeous twiglet, snapped from one of the few Japanese larches left in our woods. The vivid soft green needles, highlighting the red juvenile cones. It’s just beautiful. I picked it up and now here it is, adorning my desk as I write.

The idea that larch, for so long a staple commercial timber, is seeing its last rotation defies belief. Larch fencing posts preceded the nasty creosoted competition. Sawn larch has a striking decorative pattern and a legendary durability. 

Somewhere deep in my memory I have stored the idea that larch was uniquely qualified to make boat skins, whatever they were or are, but I suspect this distinction has, by now, been overtaken by plastics or carbon fibre or whatever.

Larch plantations coming into leaf gave a message of approaching spring, and the gold of the autumn foliage presaged winter. Larch, especially of the Japanese persuasion, was for decades a staple ingredient of UK commercial forestry, often used as a bridge between native broadleaves and deciduous conifers in our developing commercial sprucewoods, softening the contrast in colours and forms and adding seamlessly to the landscape

But it’s now doomed, we are told. Our future will be larchless. What is so surprising is the lack of any sense of outrage or grief that such a thing can happen – and to a species of tree that fulfils such a varied and valuable role in our silviculture.

Can there be a memorial service for larch? We should have a Larch Sunday, an annual reminder of what we have lost. Sounds like something for the National Forest. I can only look at my spring larch twiglet and mourn.

Then there is Corsican pine. Uncompromisingly commercial and lacking any of the delicate lifestyle of larch, it at one time looked like a dependable contributor to timber production in lowland England. Spectacular, by all means. Windfirm too.

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There are two whacking great Corsicans somehow surviving on the central reservation of our dual carriageway just up the road from here. Lucky they aren’t in Plymouth, isn’t it?

Presumably they are protected by a TPO. And the very prominent plantation which surmounts the National Trust’s May Hill, overlooking the Severn Estuary, is all Corsican.

You can see it for miles. Its name refers to a certain Captain May who used it to help navigate the diverse currents of the Severn. However, as a timber commercial species, CP is, I reckon, a no-no. And, environmentally speaking, another negative. 

What else have we got left? Among the conifers, with the outstanding exception of Douglas fir, not much. Norway spruce disappoints and looks as unhappy as it grows, nursing oak and beech and fated to be removed in thinning when its work amongst the hardwoods is complete. The tradition of establishing oakwood with a Norway nurse was, I suggest, a failure at almost every level. But at least it is relatively healthy (I think).

Douglas fir, (Image: FJ)

I’m sorry this is so gloomy. The combination of a persistent drizzle and some cold and cheerless weather is getting me down. It’s a cold and cloudy spring, all right. Let’s just sit back and look out of my office window, and what can I see? Dead elm and moribund ash. Come on, try harder. The cherry tree in our orchard is blossoming like snow. There. I’m smiling now. The sun is not all that far away.

It’s just as well. Have any of you had to deal with Forestry England lately? They have a spectacular new line in colour schemes for their vehicles down here. Perhaps this will cheer us all up even if I continue to hear all manner of moans about how long they take to actually do anything.

READ MORE: Phytophthora ramorum: Larch to be removed from disease's UK 'epicentre'

I spoke this morning with the very progressive owner of a fine estate on which proper forest management has been practised since the days of Dedication. How many of you remember those? It’s taken four years to deal with a minor transgression which arose as part of a heritage scheme where a few mouldy and rotten old beeches were felled by mistake. Tut tut. But this wasn’t part of any scheme to reduce carbon in the atmosphere or to improve the quality of the air we breathe. In the words of that song about the big yellow taxi: “They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum. And they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em.”

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, so the song says. But when you have local government employing contractors to fell healthy amenity trees in the small hours of the morning to build a car park for, no doubt, all those electric vehicles that will soon appear out of nowhere, then you do wonder how the good old FE is. It seems never to be mentioned in any of the prominent cases of controversial felling we see reported in the national press.