I’ve always loved Christina Rossetti’s lyrics to Holst’s “In the Bleak Midwinter.” I question the carol’s Biblical accuracy, but the line “Earth stood hard as iron; water like a stone” perfectly captures midwinter here in the Great Lakes region.
In our sandy soils, the first hard freeze can happen overnight. The ground locks up so fast that, even though plant roots are still alive, they can’t take in water. And that raises a question: what does this sudden freeze mean for our stately pines?
Fortunately, pines are built for endurance. Their wax-coated needles lose little moisture. Their cells contain antifreeze-like compounds that keep ice from forming. And conifers generally store enough internal water to carry them until spring finally softens the ground.
Snow helps as well. A steady snowpack insulates the soil, and brief winter thaws let meltwater trickle down — an important refill after this unusually dry fall.
But late winter brings a new challenge. Midwinter may be bleak, but the growing strength of the sun in February and March can wake the needles into activity. If the roots are still trapped in frozen soil with no water to draw from, the needles can dry out. That’s the “winter burn” we see when the south-facing sides of conifers turn a dull, tired brown.
So while I welcome any scrap of sunshine in the depths of winter, our trees survive best under the season’s dimmer light. Rossetti called it the “bleak midwinter”—and for the pines standing silent in the cold, that bleakness is not a hardship at all, but a kind of protection until spring returns.
