Was that ever dumb!
I should admit up front that I’ve forgotten almost everything I thought I learned in a year of forest technology, other than a lasting appreciation for pine trees
I have 33 exotic pines that I carefully grew from seed, nurtured and carefully identified as to species and variety, until they escaped from the living-room nursery and met the great outdoors.
I should have labelled them. I should have made a rudimentary map.
Some of them I’m pretty sure of: the Scots pine and the ponderosa pine, for example. The Scots pine because it’s the only two-needle pine that I planted, and its bark differs from our native lodgepole pine. I think the seeds were a bonus gift included with seeds I actually ordered (waste not, want not).
The ponderosa because it’s a three-needle pine.
Wait a minute … What’s with the focus on the number of needles?
Well, they’re a distinguishing feature. Pluck the needles off yer pine. If they’re short and come off one at a time, you’re probably lookin’ at a spruce. If they’re long and come off in pairs, that’ll likely be yer lodgepole pine. In threes or fives, they’re exotic to the Yukon.
And along with bark and cones, a forester or nursery operator can figure out the species. It’s a self-evident obviosity that I am neither. And I only have one tree out of the 33 that has a cone. I’m gonna send its picture to the UBC Botanical Garden Forums and see what they say.
Or if there’s a forester reading this, yer welcome to come out and give me yer best guess.
Wandering in the old plantation one day, I spied this wee cone high up in one tree. At first I thought it was a cone from one of the larches that I planted at about the same time as my pines. Aggressive buggers those larches. They grow about two feet a year and, unlike my pines, they’re not shy about producing cones … or seed. I think they’re about to become a weed species in my forest.
I digress. The cone turned out to be attached to the as-yet-unnamed pine. It’s real!
I should admit up front that I’ve forgotten almost everything I thought I learned in a year of forest technology, other than a lasting appreciation for pine trees. I managed to score a job, for a couple of years, with federal forestry, a lot of which was spent at the Kananaskis Forest Experiment Station, with access to the high ridges of the eastern slopes of the Rockies.
That’s where I discovered the limber pine and the whitebark pine, the first five-needle pines I’d ever seen.
As far as I know, all the nut pines (as in the pine nuts you put in yer salad) are five-needle pines. Take it as a given that the cones are fairly big.
Anyhow, that’s why I grew ’em. Besides salads, pine nuts are really good in koftas.
As best as I can remember, I started with 12 different species, in about 2006, thinking it’d be great to corner the local market in pine nuts, or at least have my own source.
Reality struck in about 2015 as we were walking along the driveway admiring the trees: “Jeez, I’ll be dead and gone by the time these things grow any cones.”
Ten years later, a bunch of them have pollen cones and some even have what I assume might actually turn into seed cones, if I can pollinate them.
But I don’t know what they are anymore, dammit!
