50 Fun Facts About Pine Trees

Which famous children's book character has a name often traced to a rare Tuscan word for pine nut?

Pinocchio may take his name from a rare Tuscan word for pine nut, or from the Italian for pine and eye. Geppetto carves the puppet in a Tuscan village.

Which biblical name was given to a bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains that is over 4,800 years old?

Methuselah is named for the man the Bible credits with its longest lifespan, 969 years. The Forest Service long kept the tree's exact location secret to protect it.

Pine nuts are one of the traditional ingredients pounded in a marble mortar to make which sauce from Genoa?

Pesto takes its name from the Genoese verb meaning to pound or crush. Cooks abroad often swap the costly pine nuts for walnuts, cashews or almonds.

Which US state, the most heavily forested by share of its land, is nicknamed the Pine Tree State?

Maine made the white pine cone and tassel its official state flower in 1895, even though a pine, being a conifer, bears no true flowers at all.

Which solid form of pine resin do violinists rub on their bow hair and baseball pitchers keep in a small bag?

Rosin is the glassy solid left behind when the liquid part of pine resin is distilled off. On a bow it adds the friction that makes the strings vibrate clearly.

Which long-running TV western was set on a Nevada ranch named after the tall pines growing near Lake Tahoe?

Bonanza followed the Cartwright family on the Ponderosa, which producer David Dortort said he named for the ponderosa pines growing above 5,000 feet there.

Which country's flag carries a green cedar, a tree that belongs to the pine family, between two red stripes?

Lebanon treats its cedar as a symbol of immortality, resilience and hope. Since 1990 its constitution has required the whole tree, trunk included, to be green.

Which US state's Tar Heel nickname recalls the tar and pitch once made from its plentiful pine forests?

North Carolina led the world in naval stores such as tar and pitch from about 1720 to 1870, and the Royal Navy was an especially keen customer.

Which Kansas City Royals star had a 1983 home run wiped out for having too much pine tar on his bat?

George Brett stormed out of the dugout when the umpires voided the homer. The league president later upheld the Royals' protest, and they won the resumed game 5-4.

The Pinewood Derby, a race for small cars carved from blocks of pine, is a tradition of which youth organisation?

Cub Scouts first raced the unpowered cars in 1953 at a Scout House in Manhattan Beach, California, and within a year the idea had spread to packs nationwide.

Retsina, a white wine flavoured with Aleppo pine resin for at least 2,000 years, is a speciality of which country?

Greece is said to owe the taste to the ancient habit of sealing wine jars with pine resin to keep the air out. The flavour proved so popular that it outlived the jars.

Which solvent, long used by oil painters to thin their paints, is distilled from the resin of living pine trees?

Turpentine was once tapped from living pines, but most of it is now a by-product of pulping wood. It will lift sticky pine pitch from clothes when other solvents fail.

The spiral rows of scales on a pine cone, like those of a flowering artichoke, follow which famous mathematical series?

Fibonacci numbers, each the sum of the two before it, also describe the family tree of a honeybee. Not every species of cone follows the pattern, though.

The Wollemi pine, a so-called living fossil, was discovered in 1994 in a remote national park in which country?

Australia's Wollemi pine is no true pine: it belongs to the ancient family of the monkey-puzzle tree. It was found only because a group was exploring for new canyons.

Which Pacific country planted vast forests of California's Monterey pine in the 1930s using teams of relief workers?

New Zealand has grown Monterey pine as tall as 61 metres in just 41 years. In California the tree is native to only three small areas near the coast.

Which member of the pine family is unusual among conifers for shedding all of its needles every autumn?

Larch is one of the few deciduous conifers. When its cones ripen, the scales spread apart and release winged seeds, two to a scale.

What do the woody scales of a fallen pine cone do when the air around them turns damp?

They close up, which keeps the light, windborne seeds inside until dry weather returns and a breeze can carry them farther from the parent tree.

A Japanese white pine bonsai, trained since 1625, survived which event before Japan gave it to the United States?

The Hiroshima bombing spared the Yamaki Pine, and in 1976 bonsai master Masaru Yamaki gave it to America as one of 53 bicentennial trees. It is nicknamed the Peace Tree.

In East Asian art, the pine joins the plum and which other plant as the Three Friends of Winter?

Bamboo, like the pine and the plum, does not wither as the cold deepens, which is why Chinese artists grouped the three. The phrase goes back to a Song dynasty writer.

A bronze pine cone almost four metres tall, once a fountain, gives its name to a courtyard in which tiny state?

Vatican City's giant cone, the Pigna, once spouted water near the Pantheon. The bronze peacocks on either side of it are copies of a pair from Emperor Hadrian's tomb.

Which Italian composer portrayed four pine-shaded spots of his adopted city in the 1924 tone poem Pines of Rome?

Respighi moved to Rome from Bologna and said its umbrella-like pines spoke to his imagination. His four movements visit the Villa Borghese, a catacomb, the Janiculum and the Appian Way.

Loblolly pine seeds that orbited the Moon in 1971 and grew into 'Moon trees' flew on which NASA mission?

Apollo 14 command module pilot Stuart Roosa carried about 500 tree seeds in a small canister. One loblolly pine grown from them was planted at the White House.

In 1952 a chemist in Watertown, New York, invented which everyday product, shaped like an evergreen tree?

The car air freshener sold as Little Trees was the work of Julius Sämann, a German-Jewish chemist who had fled the Nazis. The trees are still made in Watertown.

Which large predators of the Rocky Mountains fatten up for winter by raiding squirrel hoards of whitebark pine seeds?

Grizzly bears count the seeds as an important food before hibernation, and let squirrels do the work: they rob the cone piles, called middens, that the squirrels store.

The Eisenhower Tree, a loblolly pine the president wanted cut down, stood until 2014 on which famous golf course?

Augusta National member Dwight Eisenhower hit the pine on the 17th fairway so often that in 1956 he proposed felling it. The chairman adjourned the meeting rather than say no.

The critically endangered Torrey pine grows wild on Santa Rosa Island and along the coast of which California city?

San Diego's Torrey pines are probably a relict of a much wider Ice Age range. Coastal fog in spring and summer gives them just enough moisture to survive the dry climate.

The Pine Barrens, a sandy pitch-pine forest said to be the birthplace of a legendary devil, lies in which US state?

New Jersey's Pine Barrens gave rise to the legend of the Jersey Devil, said to have been born there in 1735. Its sandy, nutrient-poor soils also shelter rare pygmy pitch pines.

Which American colony struck silver 'pine tree' shillings, nearly all dated 1652, without asking England's permission?

Massachusetts made Boston silversmith John Hull its mint master in 1652 without telling the English government. Its earlier coins had shown a willow and then an oak.

Colonial New England's biggest white pines were cut with the King's broad arrow and reserved for which naval use?

Ship masts made from a single white pine trunk were so prized that felling a marked tree was a crime. Resentment boiled over in New Hampshire's Pine Tree Riot of 1772.

Which conifer, the only one of its genus native to northern Europe, ranges from western Europe to eastern Siberia?

Scots pine is the national tree of Scotland and once formed much of the Caledonian Forest that covered the Highlands. Its orange-red bark makes it easy to pick out.

Which conifer of the Sierra Nevada, the tallest and most massive of its genus, bears cones up to half a metre long?

Sugar pine is named for its sweet resin, which Native Americans used as a sweetener and John Muir preferred to maple sugar. Muir called the tree the king of the conifers.

The Coulter pine's spiky cones, which can weigh eight pounds, have earned which grim nickname among Californian locals?

Widowmakers are among the heaviest cones of any pine and are armed with claw-like scales. Among all conifers, only the cones of one araucaria species weigh more.

Which tree of the pine family has cones whose three-pointed bracts are said to resemble a mouse's back legs and tail?

Douglas fir is not a true fir, spruce or pine, whatever its common names suggest. The mouse-like bracts poke out above every scale of the cone, which makes it easy to identify.

What must the resin-sealed cones of many jack pines be exposed to before they will open and release their seeds?

Fire opens the cones just after it has killed the mature trees, so the seeds fall straight onto the burnt ground and reseed it. The cones can stay shut for many years.

Which rare songbird breeds almost only in dense stands of young jack pine in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario?

Kirtland's warbler is so tied to the tree that people in Michigan call it the jack pine bird. It needs trees only about 5 to 20 feet tall, and winters in the Bahamas.

Which mountain bird buries tens of thousands of whitebark pine seeds each year and so plants most of the trees?

Clark's nutcracker can carry up to 150 seeds at a time in a pouch under its tongue. It stores more than it needs, and the uneaten surplus can sprout into new trees.

Which finch has an oddly shaped beak that works as a tool for prising seeds out of conifer cones?

Crossbill beaks, whose tips overlap, are so specialised for cones that the birds often breed in the winter months, when the supply of seeds is at its peak.

Which berry was banned in the United States for decades because it carries a rust disease that kills white pines?

Blackcurrant bushes host white pine blister rust for part of its life cycle. The federal ban was lifted in 1966, but several states kept bans of their own.

Which mythological name was given to a Nevada bristlecone pine, almost 4,900 years old, that was felled in 1964?

Prometheus was cut down for research by a graduate student and Forest Service staff. It had grown near the tree line on Wheeler Peak and was the oldest tree then known.

The only pine whose natural range crosses the Equator into the Southern Hemisphere grows on which Indonesian island?

Sumatra's Merkus pine reaches about two degrees south on mounts Kerinci and Talang. Every other wild member of the pine family stays north of the line.

A pine cone tops the thyrsus, the ivy-wound fennel staff carried in ancient festivals by followers of which god?

Dionysus and his followers, the satyrs and maenads, carried the staff as a symbol of fertility and pleasure. The Romans gave it to his counterpart, Bacchus.

Which Canadian artist, who drowned on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, painted the iconic canvas The Jack Pine?

Tom Thomson died at 39, shortly before his friends founded the Group of Seven. His painting shows the most broadly distributed pine in Canada.

What do botanists call the small bundles, usually of two to five needles, in which pine leaves grow?

Fascicles are a handy clue for naming a pine, because the needle count in each one differs between species. White pines, for instance, carry five to a bundle.

Pines belong to which group of seed plants, whose name means naked seed because no fruit encloses the seeds?

Gymnosperms also include the cycads and the ginkgo, which have separate male and female plants. A pine, by contrast, carries its male and female cones on the same tree.

Tree rings from bristlecone pines gave scientists the first published sequence for calibrating which dating method?

Radiocarbon dates drift because the amount of carbon-14 in the air has varied over time. Wesley Ferguson's bristlecone ring sequence supplied wood of known age to correct them.

Longleaf pine seedlings spend 5 to 12 years as a low tuft of needles, a stage foresters name after which plant?

Grass-stage seedlings barely grow upward and can take years just to reach ankle height. They look more like a dark-green fountain of needles than a young tree.

The loblolly pine takes its name from an old Southern word for which kind of ground, where the tree often grows?

A mudhole was called a loblolly in the American South, a word first borrowed from the look of thick porridge. The pine favours lowlands and swampy areas.

In famine years, Scandinavians ground the inner bark of pine trees into flour to stretch which staple food?

Bread bulked out with ground bark was last eaten as famine food in Norway during the Napoleonic Wars, and in Finland as late as the civil war of 1918.

Which confederacy of Native nations, also called the Haudenosaunee, took the eastern white pine as its Tree of Peace?

The Iroquois tell how five nations buried their weapons beneath a white pine when they united. The tree's needles, which grow in fives, stand for those five nations.

The Battle of Lone Pine, named after a solitary Turkish pine, was fought by Anzac troops during which 1915 campaign?

Gallipoli's lone tree was also known to the soldiers as the Lonesome Pine. They took the main trench line within hours, but the wider August offensive failed.