Plant Guide > Trees > Pines > White Pine Tree

White Pine Tree

White Pine (Pinus Strobus, Linn.)-A stately tree, 100 to 120 feet high, conical, with spreading, horizontal branches in whorls of five. Bark grey, furrowed, thick, with broad, scaly ridges. Wood light, soft, close grained, resinous, easily worked. Buds, a strong, terminal, set round by five lateral ones in whorl; 1/4 to 1/2 inch long, pointed, with thin, pale-brown scales. Leaves evergreen, needle-like, in fives, sheathed at base of bundle, 3 to 5 inches long, slender, 3-sided, flexible, blue-green. Flowers in June, monoecious; staminate, clustered at base of season's shoots, 2/3 to 1 inch long, catkin-like, yellowish ; pistillate, subterminal, single or in twos, stemmed, elliptical, pink or purplish, and scaly, 2 ovules on each scale. Fruit biennial, 5 to 10 inches long, slender, stalked, with thin, unarmed scales ; seeds winged. Preferred habitat, good soil, moist woodlands, or uplands. Distribution, Newfoundland to Manitoba; south through Iowa, Illinois and Ohio to northern Georgia ; southern Canada and Eastern States, along Alleghanies to eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Uses : One of the best ornamental conifers and formerly the chief lumber tree in this country.

Pines bear their evergreen leaves in sheathed bundles set on little projecting shelves along the twigs. The sheaths are shed during the spring in all the white pines, and the number of leaves in a bundle is always five. Certain pitch pines have leaves in fives, but the sheaths will be found at the bases of the bundles throughout the season. These 5-leaved pitch pines are all Western trees. In Eastern woods a 5-leaved pine is a white pine, P. Strobus, whether it is a flourishing little sapling, with only three or four whorls of branches coming out from its central stem, or a great forest tree towering above its broad-leaved neighbours, noble and picturesque, through storms have destroyed the symmetry of its youth.

White Pine Tree picture