Time for larching around

This week Dick Warner ponders over the paradoxical deciduous larch tree.

I stood looking at a larch tree and thinking what a paradox it was. A typical conifer with needles and cones but, unlike all the others, it’s deciduous. The only deciduous conifer native to Europe, and most of those from other continents are related to it.

The European larch is not native to Ireland or Britain, though quite a lot of them have been planted in both countries. It comes from the mountains of central Europe, the Alps and upland areas in France, Germany and Austria, and usually only grows wild at high altitudes.