The story of a foreign species which is now part of the scenery

They formed a thick golden-brown carpet for the entire width of the lane and, as I walked across them, I could smell the damp and clinical scent of pine forests and coniferous-rich woodlands.

Soon, however, the rain ceased and the winds dried the needles, at the same time blowing them into the verges and hedgerows.

The draught of passing traffic also served to clear the road of the needles and, within a day or two, they had vanished, although careful scrutiny of the gutters revealed the destination of a few.

Nature had taken care of that unexpected crop and had tidied away, or distributed to good effect, some of the waste products of the countryside.

The needles in question were not from pine trees. They came from the larch, which is an example of a rather unusual tree - a deciduous conifer. This means it is not evergreen, but sheds its leaves during the winter months, unlike the Scots pine and other firs.

In the autumn, larch needles turn to a pleasing golden-brown shade and, in some cases, can remain on the tree over the winter. But a powerful gale of the kind experienced in our locality before Christmas can quickly cause a larch to be stripped bare.

As I pen these notes, I can look across the dale from our house and see a forest of conifers on a distant hillside. Prominent among them are countless larches, still bearing their golden-brown needles.

They are easily identified among the sea of dark evergreen pines which surrounds them, but very soon those remaining needles will be shed in favour of the new and very soft, tender replacements.

For a time, those larches will continue to be easily noticed among the pines despite the distance because their foliage will be lighter coloured and rather more delicate.

Although the larch is very much a feature of our mountains and forests, it is not a native tree. It was introduced to Britain from Europe between 1620 and 1629, but was then intended as an ornamental tree, destined for large gardens and parklands.

It didn't take long for its value as a timber producer to be recognised, with the result that successive dukes of Atholl, between 1740 and 1830, began to plant huge forests of larch on their Perthshire estates.

It was the second duke who, in 1728, began to experiment with larch as a timber producer rather than a mere ornament and his enthusiasm was taken up by his successors.

Between them, they planted more than 27 million larch trees over 15,000 acres of former barren land.

Unusually for a conifer, the wood of the larch is hard, being especially tough in trees grown in Europe. There, the winters are colder and longer, which combine to allow those continental larches to rest for more lengthy periods than their English counterparts.

This produces a higher quality of timber, but here in Britain, the larch's rust-coloured wood is prized for making furniture, wall panelling and other domestic products. The tough wood from the continental larches is used outdoors, where it can endure all weathers, while the bark is also used for tanning and the production of turpentine.

The larch also differs from conifers in other ways. For example, it does not shut out all the light of the sun, which means other plants and flowers can grow beneath it.

In the right conditions, it can grow up to at least 100ft (30m) in height or even 125ft (38m) on occasions. It is also very fast-growing and so is often used as a form of shelter for more vulnerable woodland species.

Quite often, a new plantation of deciduous trees will have a barrier of larches around it to provide the necessary shelter from winds and storms.

Not everyone welcomed the larch to British forests. The Lakeland poet, William Wordsworth, was highly critical. In his famous Guide to the Lakes, published in 1835, he grumbled about foreign trees being introduced to the Lake District landscape, giving special mention to larches and plantations of firs, saying they were "seldom with advantage" and often caused great injury to the appearance of the countryside.

Another writer, Sir William Beach Thomas, produced an essay about deciduous trees and referred to the larch as "notorious".

Today, we accept the larch as part of our countryside and essential to our forests, whether of pine or otherwise, never pausing to think it was introduced many years ago from far-off foreign places.

A walk through one of those woods where the larch protects its neighbours may remind us that it does provide a very useful service.

My postbag this week includes letters from two readers in Richmond and one from Yarm.

One refers to my notes about longtailed tits in our garden, my correspondent saying she has noticed three in hers. As she has never seen them before in her garden, she found the experience most enthralling.

I have explained that longtailed tits do tend to move from place to place with some frequency, while out of the breeding season they tend to gather in small flocks, when they make themselves noticed due to their constant twittering.

She also tells me that her cat recently caught a water shrew. Shrews tend to emit a rather unpleasant odour when caught by cats and this makes them very unpalatable! Many shrews thus escape, although some very nervous ones die from a heart attack due to their shocking experience.

My second Richmond correspondent comments on recent notes about the green man and tells me there is such a figure on the ceiling of the north porch of St Mary's Parish Church in the town.

In his The Buildings of England series, in the volume dealing with the North Riding of Yorkshire, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner refers to this as a bearded face. This is a very ancient church with parts dating to the twelfth century, while the tower was built by the first Earl of Westmorland about 1400.

She reminds me that, prior to the Reformation, it would have been a Roman Catholic church and it has a list of parish priests dating to 1300. It also contains stalls from Easby Abbey after it was sacked by Henry VIII, following which St Mary's was used by the newly-created Church of England.

It is interesting that the seats have misericords with carvings showing human faces and foliage. More green men?

My Yarm correspondent refers to my notes about Friday 13 being an unlucky day. He tells me of being employed at Skinningrove Iron Works between 1944 and 1967 and among the men who travelled to work were some from Staithes.

Being a fishing community, some of its residents were extremely superstitious. Some of the men would never make the journey to Skinningrove on any Friday, whether it fell on the 13th or not, and he recalls several occasions when Staithes men aboard the works bus actually stopped it and got off to walk back home because they noticed a pig during their journey to work.

In fishing communities around the country, the word "pig" must not be used even today, either when at sea or on shore. It is often known simply as "the thing".

For a fisherman to meet a pig on his way to the boat was considered extremely unlucky and few, if any, would put to sea if they encountered one.

The same correspondent refers to his time playing local cricket and tells me that whenever a batsman walked to the crease, he would announce to the umpire whether he was going to play right-handed or left-handed, and the umpire would relay that information to the fielders. Whenever a left-hander made his style known, one umpire would call out to the field: "Cuddy wiff."

I've also heard this spoken as cuddy wifter and another term was cuddy flipper, while it seems a more general term is either cuddy handed or perhaps gallack-handed.

In the West Riding, the term was kay dollak or merely dollak, a left-handed person being a kay-dollaker. Gawk-handed is something different - that indicates someone who is ham-fisted or clumsy.