I’ve never hesitated about which is my favourite tree. Oaks stand in a class of their own. Their rugged permanence, their cranky growth, their intricate mass of details in crooked shoots, leaves idiosyncratically sculpted, tough little wooden fruit, furrowed grey bark and limbs stretched wide in defiance of gravity all give them a presence no other trees can match.
And after the oak; a second choice? For me it’s the larch, the conifer that sits uneasily in its classification. It’s no softwood; its timber can be hard as horn, element-defying. You can build boats with it. It will grow ramrod-straight to a hundred feet. Its spring leafing is a poem in tender green, its flowering has a Fabergé intricate elegance, its autumn colour glowing yellow. In winter it makes skeletal cathedrals and its seedlings people the forest floor with exquisite soft miniatures.
When larch was introduced to Britain in King Charles the Second’s time it was greeted with rapture as a plant of infinite potential. John Evelyn rhapsodised about it in his Sylva, and the ancestral larches still stand, like wrinkled grandmothers who have never lost their poise, where their godfather, the Duke of Atholl planted them four hundred years ago. He planted millions of them in the first afforestation of Scotland; they remained the leading forestry tree until the great conifers of the American West began to revolutionise forest planting. The news that a new form of phytophthera has started to kill them is deeply unsettling.
