PINUS, OR ABIES LARIX, LARIX EUROPEA.— THE WHITE LARCH TREE. 
Class XXI. MONCECIA. Order VIII. MQNADELPHIA. 
Natural Order, CONIFERS.— THE FIR TRIBE. 
Fig. (n) the stamineous catkin, natural size ; (A) do. enlarged ; (BB) front and side views of the polleniferous scales ; (r) pistilliferous 
catkin natural size; (C) do. enlarged; (</ e) front and side views of the scales separated; (D E) do. enlarged; (/) naked 
seeds with their wings ; ( g ) scales of the cone; (/t) a leaf. 
The White Larch is a native of the Alps, of Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and according to Miller, of Si- 
beria. It has been long cultivated very extensively, and with great advantage, in this country ; it flowers 
in March and April, before the leaves are fully expanded. 
The Larch is a tree of quick growth, rising to the height of fifty feet or more, with wide spreading 
branches, whose extremities droop in the most graceful manner. They are adorned with numerous narrow, 
spreading, linear, bluntish, entire, soft, bright-green leaves, which spring in pencil-like tufts, from alternate, 
perennial cup-like, scaly buds. The leaves are deciduous, about an inch long, and have no other stipulas 
than the scales of the bud. From similar buds spring separately, on the same branch, the male and female 
flowers; the latter only accompanied by a few leaves. The bracteas to each flower are numerous, recurved, 
obtuse, with fine fringe-like teeth, chaffy, reddish-brown, and deciduous. The male flowers are in small 
lateral, cylindrical catkins, yellow, drooping, about an inch long, with the common filament much shorter 
than the bracteas; the anthers crowded, deflexed, inflated, and two-lobed in front, with a short, recurved 
point. The female catkins are erect, ovate; twice as large as the male, beautifully variegated with green and 
pink ; one lip of each scale is orbicular ; the other much larger, fiddle-shaped, reflexed, with a prominent, 
awl-shaped green point. This lip becomes erect, enlarged, projecting always beyond the orbicular one, 
which dilates, hardens, and becomes the seed-bearing scale of the cone. The strobiles or cones are erect, 
rather above an inch long, ovate, obtuse at the apex, and purple, when young ; and becoming of a reddish 
brown, when ripe. They have imbricated scales, which are spreading, orbicular, slightly reflexed, and jagged 
on the edges. In each scale are two-winged seeds. 
The Larches are scarcely to be separated generically from the Abietes or Firs, as they agree in having 
their cone-scales rounded and membranous, and chiefly differ in the fasciculate arrangement of their leaves. 
The distinction is, however, serviceable, and a still further segregation has been attempted of the Cedars from 
the true Larches : the leaves of the latter being deciduous, while those of the former are evergreen. 
The Larch is, after the common pine, probably the most valuable of the tribe. Though a native of the 
mountains of more southern regions, it thrives uncommonly well in Britain ; and as it grows more rapidly, 
and also in more varied soils than the other, it is, perhaps, better adapted for general cultivation. In the 
south, it attains an immense height ; some single beams of Larch, employed in the palaces and public 
buildings of Venice being said to be one hundred and twenty feet long. Even in the plantations of the 
Duke of Athol, and other proprietors in Perthshire, some larches are at least one hundred feet high. The 
wild alternation of hill and valley in that county, with the general opening of the glens and exposure of the 
surface to the south, seem to afford the larch a situation something like its native locality in the Tyrolese 
and Dalmatian Alps : for though other trees, and some of them fast growing ones, such as the spruce, 
have been planted at the same time, the larch overtops them all ; and in summer, when it is in the full 
luxuriance of its Laves, (which are a bright clover green,) it rises over the dark forest like an obelisk of 
beryl. The Larch sheds its leaves, and is probably by that means saved from those keen blasts of the very 
early spring that prove destructive to pines. Even when naked it is an ornamental tree. The trunk is 
generally straight, tapering gradually to a point ; the branches, which are rather small in proportion to the 
tree, taper up in the form of a perfect cone ; and the whole is of a lively brown, streaked with a golden 
colour. 
It has been extensively planted, more especially in Scotland ; and the success has been far greater, and 
far more uniform, than in the case of any other tree, not a native of the country. It appears that the quality 
of Larch timber does not depend so much upon the maturity of the tree, and the slowness of its growth, as 
that of the pine, — as a fishing boat, built of Larch only forty years old, has been found to last three times as 
long as one of the best Norway pine. 
Professor Burnett in his Outlines, observes, “That much prejudice has existed against the use of the 
Larch in ship-building ; and some persons have not scrupled to call Larch vessels ‘leather ships/ and 
‘sailors 5 coffins . 5 But the following statement, given by Mr. Gould, will shew that such notions could only 
have been founded upon ignorance. 
