How was the plant overwintered in the pot? Any protection for it? My concern would be damage sustained from being overwintered in a pot outside, especially the roots. Larches, at least here in MN, are one of the earliest plants to leaf out.

if day temps are below 60 .. how low are night temps?? and how cold are those roots in the pot ...

total guess .. its struggling to overcome dormancy ... and keeping it shaded is not helping ...

what zone are you???

ken

Probably nearly all of the time plants acquired under this name these days are actually weeping Japanese larch. One garden plant book I have here written by two veteran nurserymen rates weeping European larch hardy to Zone 3 and weeping Japanese to Zone 5, so if you are as you say in Zone 3 this could be a critical point.

I have found that weeping Japanese larch is quite sensitive to shading and will readily go bare in sections if shaded much at all.

You have gone so long waiting, the only recourse is to wait a little longer, because if it doesn't grow out soon, it will probably not do so at all. If it got cold enough over winter and warm enough in spring for those other conifers to break dormancy, I doubt this is a dormancy issue for the larch. If the leafier half of the larch is all on one side, there may be too much root damage to the non-leafy side to get it the water it needs.

I posted a picture of the Larch that I took last summer, when it looked so amazing, under both "Container Gardening" and "Name That Plant". From everything I've read and seen, it is actually a European Larch, not Japanese (the needles grow in clusters and there's only one trunk), but can anyone tell me for sure? The nursery we purchased it from has an excellent reputation with all the landscapers in Anchorage, so I tend to believe them about the variety. The daytime temperatures are now reaching 60+ degrees, with sun and 70 degrees due by the middle of the week. Night time temps are still in the 50's.

Oh, and we moved it out to full sun today, although the sunshine only lasted until about noon before the clouds moved in!

Does it have bluish needles and pinkish shoots?

Some of the new needles are bluish although most of them are bright green. There are no pink shoots, and the bluish needles seem to be mostly on the half of the tree that has the fewest needles, i.e. isn't doing so well!

Unless you purchased from a conifer specialist who knows the difference or such a specialist had supplied genuine weeping European larches to the nursery you bought from the odds are very much against ending up with one at this time.

Various clones and selected seedlings of more or less pendulous habit have been sold as L. decidua 'Pendula' since the 1800s, yet the mass-produced clone so sold in recent years is L. Kaempferi 'Pendula'...The present author has seen no recently marketed specimens of authentic weeping L. decidua and regards it as extremely rare

--A.L. Jacobson, North American Landscape Trees (1996, Ten Speed Press, Berkeley)

bboy,

Thanks for the info. I'd give anything to know for sure if my tree is Japanese or European, but since the biggest difference seems to be the hardiness zone, wouldn't the fact that winters here the past decade have been extremely mild, with the thermometer seeing 10-15 degrees below less than one week each winter, still give a Japanese larch a chance at survival?

If the plant survives the summer, what should I do to make sure next winter doesn't completely do it in?

Put it in the ground. If you want to do any serious gardening there you will have to fence out the browsers anyway.

We received a beautiful green plant and put it in the ground the same day, where it has high shade and sun in the afternoons. It looked wonderful until about a week ago, when it suddenly turned brown all over and now it's dropping its needles. The temps have been above 90 for a couple of weeks now (102 on one day) and there has been no rain, but we have watered it twice a week. Is it dead, or might it come back? Was it the heat that killed it? We'd apreciate any information we can get. Thanks!