Larch Trees in Bloom again

At this time of year I always look carefully at my favourite larch tree in Craiglockart Dell along the Water of Leith (this is the larch I 'followed' for Tree Following back in 2014). The reason I look so carefully at the tree at this time of year is to see if the flowers are out yet. Last week they weren't out and the buds were barely recognisable as such. Today though I was delighted to see that several flowers are already out and I was able to capture photos of some of the flowers at an earler stage of their development than ever before!

Here is a very young larch flower

this one below is I think slightly further along

and these are at their best already

This photo below, though out of focus) gives you some idea of how many flowers are in this tree so far

As part of Tree Following in 2014 I put together this post showing the development of the larch flower into a cone, which was something that before then, I'd never noticed before. It's well worth looking very carefully at any larch trees you pass, though not all of them have this many flowers!

The larch isn't the only tree in bloom at the moment, the hornbeam catkins are at their best

As many readers of this blog know I love trees and so I am very concerned to read articles like this one (Why are all the trees gone?), about the possibility of thousands or even millions of our trees being destroyed to allow for the development of 5G mobile phone networks and to all for the roll out of self driving vehicles. For me I'd much rather have trees than extra smart mobile phones and buses that don't have drivers.

Edited to add: It's worth pointing out that the academic paper linked to from the 'Why are all the trees gone?' article (linked above) mentions masts at shorter than tree height being a problem for the 5G signal. It then goes on to suggest masts need to be much taller, it doesn't suggest cutting down the trees. Which of course doesn't mean that councils won't cut trees down for 5G. The actual paper is here  and the section about trees is section 3.1. I'm going to write to all my political representatives (councillors, MSPs, MP) to see if any of them can give clarity of the future of trees in Edinburgh once 5G is introduced. The more people contact their political representatives the more they will realise people see this as an issue.