Nature lesson
One of my favorite kind of trees is the tamarack (also called the larch). I have quite a few of them around my house. One of them appeared in a strange place, on the south side of the house where it it is dry. The rest are smaller, 3-6' tall now and growing outside of my kitchen window where the soil is damp. The single tamarack on the south side was about 3' tall when I first noticed it and it's now about 15' high. It leans too dramatically, after a heavy wet snowfall we had in the fall. I'm hoping to tie it to another tree to straighten it out this spring.

Tamaracks are conifers but not evergreens: their leaves are slender and long and look like pine needles. Their leaves are the last to turn in the fall and they turn a gorgeous golden before they rain down to the ground. I had a row of huge tamaracks along the road that we'd been watching grow, about 10-12" in diameter, but the town cut them all down one year to make it easier (they thought) for the plow to get through. Although I was really upset I realized that, once a tree has been cut down there's really nothing you can do but accept the new landscape. Anyway, this is what the tamarack leaves look like when they first emerge. They are incredibly cute. The bark of the tamarack is a beautiful color: sort of a light brown. The shape of the tamarack is graceful. The wood's not really good for lumber, although it's a pretty color and has a nice grain. It just never gets very wide. It's hard wood, though.