While, as some have suggested, Wordsworth’s disdain for these non-native trees might possibly have been influenced by Uvedale Price’s similar condemnation of larch plantations in Essay on the Picturesque (2nd. ed., 1796, pp. 292-99), the more immediate source of Wordsworth’s campaign against larches was likely an 1808 treatise by the Bishop of Llandaff that advocates planting larches on almost every “unproductive” acre in the Lake District. Photo: Emily Young.