Pine Trees
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50 free Pine Trees trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Pine trees are easy to take for granted. They line motorways, scent cleaning products and turn up in living rooms every December, yet the genus hides some of the strangest stories in the plant world: trees older than the pyramids, cones heavy enough to be dangerous and seeds that have travelled into space. This quiz gathers fun facts about pines and their relatives in the pine family, which also takes in spruces, cedars and hemlocks. Expect questions on record-breaking trees, how needles and cones work, the birds and mammals that rely on pine seeds, and the many things people have made from pine wood, sap and nuts. It is written for curious adults, gardeners, hikers and anyone putting together a nature round for quiz night. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish knowing rather more about the tree outside your window.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which famous children's book character has a name often traced to a rare Tuscan word for pine nut?
Pinocchio
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.
Q 02Which biblical name was given to a bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains that is over 4,800 years old?
Methuselah
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.
Q 03Pine nuts are one of the traditional ingredients pounded in a marble mortar to make which sauce from Genoa?
Pesto
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.
Q 04Which US state, the most heavily forested by share of its land, is nicknamed the Pine Tree State?
Maine
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.
Q 05Which solid form of pine resin do violinists rub on their bow hair and baseball pitchers keep in a small bag?
Rosin
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.
Q 06Which long-running TV western was set on a Nevada ranch named after the tall pines growing near Lake Tahoe?
Bonanza
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.
Q 07Which country's flag carries a green cedar, a tree that belongs to the pine family, between two red stripes?
Lebanon
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.
Q 08Which US state's Tar Heel nickname recalls the tar and pitch once made from its plentiful pine forests?
North Carolina
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.
Q 09Which Kansas City Royals star had a 1983 home run wiped out for having too much pine tar on his bat?
George Brett
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.
Q 10The Pinewood Derby, a race for small cars carved from blocks of pine, is a tradition of which youth organisation?
Cub Scouts
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.
Q 11Retsina, a white wine flavoured with Aleppo pine resin for at least 2,000 years, is a speciality of which country?
Greece
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.
Q 12Which solvent, long used by oil painters to thin their paints, is distilled from the resin of living pine trees?
Turpentine
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.
Q 13The spiral rows of scales on a pine cone, like those of a flowering artichoke, follow which famous mathematical series?
Fibonacci numbers
Q 21Which Italian composer portrayed four pine-shaded spots of his adopted city in the 1924 tone poem Pines of Rome?
Respighi
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.
Q 22Loblolly pine seeds that orbited the Moon in 1971 and grew into 'Moon trees' flew on which NASA mission?
Apollo 14
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.
Q 23In 1952 a chemist in Watertown, New York, invented which everyday product, shaped like an evergreen tree?
Car air freshener
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.
Q 14The Wollemi pine, a so-called living fossil, was discovered in 1994 in a remote national park in which country?
Australia
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.
Q 15Which Pacific country planted vast forests of California's Monterey pine in the 1930s using teams of relief workers?
New Zealand
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.
Q 16Which member of the pine family is unusual among conifers for shedding all of its needles every autumn?
Larch
Larch is one of the few deciduous conifers. When its cones ripen, the scales spread apart and release winged seeds, two to a scale.
Q 17What do the woody scales of a fallen pine cone do when the air around them turns damp?
Close up
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.
Q 18A Japanese white pine bonsai, trained since 1625, survived which event before Japan gave it to the United States?
The Hiroshima bombing
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.
Q 19In East Asian art, the pine joins the plum and which other plant as the Three Friends of Winter?
Bamboo
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.
Q 20A bronze pine cone almost four metres tall, once a fountain, gives its name to a courtyard in which tiny state?
Vatican City
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.
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.
Q 24Which large predators of the Rocky Mountains fatten up for winter by raiding squirrel hoards of whitebark pine seeds?
Grizzly bears
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.
Q 25The Eisenhower Tree, a loblolly pine the president wanted cut down, stood until 2014 on which famous golf course?
Augusta National
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.
Q 26The critically endangered Torrey pine grows wild on Santa Rosa Island and along the coast of which California city?
San Diego
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.
Q 27The Pine Barrens, a sandy pitch-pine forest said to be the birthplace of a legendary devil, lies in which US state?
New Jersey
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.
Q 28Which American colony struck silver 'pine tree' shillings, nearly all dated 1652, without asking England's permission?
Massachusetts
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.
Q 29Colonial New England's biggest white pines were cut with the King's broad arrow and reserved for which naval use?
Ship masts
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.
Q 30Which conifer, the only one of its genus native to northern Europe, ranges from western Europe to eastern Siberia?
Scots pine
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.