Frozen Wonder

 Determined to start more Larix lyallii trees for experimentation, I headed back up to North Idaho in the fall of 2007.  I had already found a tree that was covered in cones, so I tried to time my trip to catch the seeds before they fell out of the cones.

That fall, I called the ranger station in Bonner's Ferry to obtain a permit to collect the seeds.  The ranger actually laughed when I told him that I wanted to collect a few hundred seeds.  "Just take them," he said.

I took a Friday off work and spent a long weekend traveling to North Idaho and back.  I'd never been up there that late in the year, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

Here's what greeted me on the trail on the way in:

The track is from black bear and the leaf had fallen from the huckleberry bushes that cover the landscape.  There was only a half-inch of snow, so driving up there wasn't really a problem.   Though the bears were obviously not hibernating yet, I didn't see any large game animals on my hike.

The tree that I'd previously located was a couple of miles in- perched on the edge of a 1000 foot cliff.  I collected dozens of cones that were at the perfect stage.  They were ripe, but had not yet released their seeds.

Once I was back home, I tried germinating some of them, but I was met with failure.  Larix lyallii isn't an easy species to propagate from seed.  I must have just been lucky that first time.  I donated seed to the seed exchange of a local botanical garden, in the hopes of giving growers in other countries access to this uncommon species.  I have to wonder if they had any better luck than I did.

Larch trees tend to have only a couple of decent cone crops per decade- if that.  I am not sure when I'll next be up there at the right time on a good year.  I kick myself for killing that tiny seedling that I had so painstakingly raised for four years.

This blog seems to be turning into an obituary for plants that I've killed.  Depressing.

Hemispheral Displacement

In the Pacific Northwest, most people (at least those of us who have spent time on the east side of the mountains) are familiar with the western Larch- Larix occidentalis.  In the fall, its deciduous needles turn bright yellow and put on a pretty good show, particularly when they are peppered out through their evergreen neighbors.

We actually have another species of larch as well, though most people don't venture into its remote habitat.  It is the subalpine larch- Larix lyallii.  You are not likely to see this plant grown in gardens, since it seems to detest our warm summers.  Mind you, our summers are very cool compared to those in most other parts of North America.  I have never seen this plant in cultivation.

 The picture to the right is of a very large specimen in North Idaho.  It isn't that big when compared to western larches, but for a Larix lyallii, this one is pretty big.

About ten years ago, my dad and I visited a small population of them in the northern part of the Idaho Panhandle.  In the picture below, the larches are on the far wall of the cirque basin (you can't see any of them clearly- I just wanted to give you a picture of how rugged and cold their habitat tends to be.)

In the little copse of larches you see on the far shore of the lake, I was able to collect a few cones that had fallen to the ground.  They still had a few seeds in them, which I took home and treated with hydrogen peroxide for 24 hours.  I got one to sprout.

My idea was to try growing this tree as a bonsai indoors under lights.  Its growing season would be during the winter months, when keeping it cool would be easy.  During the summer months, it would spend its dormancy in the refrigerator.

The tiny seedling was very spindly for its first year.  at one point, I dropped the pot and the gravelly potting medium spilled out across the floor.  I was sure that I'd killed it- but it didn't seem to be too disturbed.

When spring rolled around, I began to reduce the day-length from the lights.  After a couple of weeks of 10 hour photo-periods, I put it in the refrigerator along with a compact fluorescent bulb on a table lamp.  I gave it 8 hours of light per day for a few weeks and then took the light out.

The next October, it started to come out of dormancy on its own.  I was always amazed by this, since it had no access to light, and the temperature was presumably held very constant by the fridge.  In my reading, I had learned that dormancy is induced in larches by shortened days in the fall.  It is broken by rising temperatures in spring.  (Alas...  I have absolutely no idea where I read that, so I'm just going to be a guilty, plagiarizing fucker here)  Is there another process involved?  Is there some tiny metabolic timer that just counts out the hours, regardless of temperature?  External cues from the environment wouldn't likely have penetrated the fridge...  plus the season was off by 6 months, so it wouldn't have been getting correct signals to break dormancy in October.

Anyhow, here is what the plant looked like after 4 years or so:

That year, I was really busy, and wasn't able to go through the full routine of inducing dormancy.  I just stuffed it in the refrigerator.

That doesn't work.  It just killed it.  God damn it.  I think that this would be a viable- if high maintenance- method for growing this plant.  It would have made a very nice bonsai, and I may well have had the only one in the world growing on Southern Hemisphere schedule!

That same year, I had actually gone back to North Idaho to collect more seed.  I will show some pictures and tell the tale next week.