Lyubitel {Larch lover}

The plant known as Lyubitel or "Larch lover" (любитель лиственницы) is a creeper plant that can be found in the temperate to cold forests of Western Moskova. It is famous because its beautiful pinkish red flowers and because that despite many times people have tried to do it, it is impossible to grow them in other places than the forest. This peculiar trait has been subject of many theories, legends and folk tales.

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Folklore

There are many stories about a supernatural origin of this plant and many tales featuring it. One of the most widely known stories is a folk tale called "Lover of the forest".
Click on here for reading the tale

Once upon a time, in a Kingdom far away there was a beautiful and young girl named Svetlana. She got a golden hair which she liked a lot to ornament with red flowers. She was kind, ingenious and loved by almost everyone in the kingdom. She wasn't just a girl like every other in the world. She was the Tsarevna of the kingdom.
Svetlana lived in a palace with lots of big golden onion domes and had everything she wanted excepting one thing. She wanted adventure.
It is said that one night, she decided to run away from her room in the tallest tower. She knotted some blankets and used them as a rope. She walked through the garden and noticed something moving among the blueberry bushes. She saw a guy of her age.
This guy's name was Dmitri. He had no house to live in nor food. He was stealing berries, but he also caught the princess's attention. Them began to talk every night and became friends. She added berries to the adorns of her hair.
The weeks passed and them both fell in love. She decided to go away from the garden with him and come back before the dawn. He had no much, but he got a happy place, a groove of larch trees. It became the happy place of both
One night, the Tsar found out that his daughter was gone as well as many blueberries from the garden. He called the royal guards to hunt down the thief. "Finish him!" He ordered to them.
Svetlana and Dmitri were playing with the birds in the forest. "I want to be here forever. Nature is my place. " she said. "And I want to be yours forever. My place is with you" he replied. The guards found them both and aimed to the boy with their bayonets. Them shot.
What happened next was magical. She hugged her lover and received the shoot. She saved his life.He turnt into a larch and she into a slimy plant. Her berries and flowers covered it all. Them ended together forever...inseparable.

Basic Information

Biological Traits

This plant is a creeper, which means that it grows up by climbing on a surface, in this case, another plant. The stem is curly and wooden and got an average width between 5 millimeters and 2 centimeters depending of the part of the plant we are looking at and its age.
The leaves are green and oval shaped, with tiny thorns on the edges. During autumn, the leaves turn orange and fall for regrowing when spring comes. During the winter only the berries are visible, making it the moment of recollection.
The roots are shallow and spread wide in the soil. They are also curly and tend to curl around the roots of the tree they live over.
This climber plant only can live over larch trees, making it a possibily parasitic plant. But something that's very strange for people is that the seeds only can grow in the Western forest. It is unknown why, it could be due the substrate or even due a supernatural reason.

Ecology and Habitats

This plant can be found in forests of Moskova, living on the trunk and branches of larch trees. This plant can live on a height from the level of the sea up to 1.000 meters over the sea level, as it can be found in the larch trees close to the Sentinel Mountains.
The Larch lover requires humidity for living and can stand up during winter, entering into a state of latency until spring. It cannot survive wildfires, but the seeds inside its berries can and in fact they can grow well by being fertilized by their mother's plant ashes after a fire.

Biological Cycle

The plant grows its flowers during spring and them got fertilized by birds. The berries start to grow in the summer and they mature in the fall. During winter, the plant doesn't grow neither leaves, flowers nor new branches, but the berries still being there and are eaten by animals like birds and squirrels. When those animals hide the fruits or the seeds in holes present on a larch tree's cortex, either near the floor or in the heights, the seeds germinate.

Additional Information

Domestication

There's no known way of domesticating this species.

Uses, Products & Exploitation

The berries of this plant are used for medicinal purposes by several communities including Moskovar people from the cities since ancient times, making this plant a valuable product and also, creating an interest in cultivating it. There are many ways of eating the berries like jellies, cakes and drinks, usually mixed with other compounds due the strong flavor of the berries. The most common medicine recipe is the one listed below.

Lyubitel Jelly

• 3 Larch Lover berries. • 3 Spoons of bee honey. • 1 Leaf of mint. • Water. • 1 Mashed apple. • 1 Egg.

1. Boil the berries.
2. Mash the berries in a bowl and let them rest for a night in a dark place or covered with a piece of cloth.
3. Add water and mix using a big wooden spoon .
4. Add the honey spoons on the mashed berries and mix after each spoon added.
5. Add the mashed apple, the egg and the mint in a bowl, mix and warm until the mix acquires a brownish color.
6. Mix well the content of both bowls and drop it into a glass or pottery jar. Let it cool by burying it in a bunch of snow.

This jelly is used for lowering fever, treating eye ache, fatigue, somnolence, flu and toothache. However, some people attribute it even more curative properties, some of them are pretty curious. It is not recommended for treating bellyache. Lyubitel berry jelly can have high prices in city markets but it can be homemade. However, despite the recipe being pretty easy, messing the order of the ingredients or missing a step on the recipe can end into wrong results with weird health effects.
The berries only can be obtained from the forest, as all the trials of cultivating them on larch trees in gardens and farms had failed. This increases their value, making them a rarer fruit than almost all the other fruits sold in markets and makes it a subject of illegal commerce.

Plant book page by Gege16

Lifespan

5-10 years

Conservation Status

It is unclear how many individuals of this species exist as them all live in the Western forest and by the date is impossible to grow them in other places, so all the existing populations are natural ones.

Average Height

1- 10 meters

Geographic Distribution

• Sentinel Mountains

Discovered by

Peoples and tribes from ancient times