Xela's Garden
Scots Pine
Genus: Pinus.
Species: Pinus sylvestris.
Planted 19?? Shenstone[?] back garden
Bought 19?? from ? for £?
The outline of a juvenile Scots Pine alters as it matures losing its lower branches to form a flatter spreading crown. A mature tree can rise to 120ft (36m)
Apart from being a native of the once extensive Caledonian pine forests, the Scots pine is widely distributed around the globe in places such as Siberia, The Artic Circle, Scandinavia and Southern Spain.
There are several distinguishing features of the Scots Pine. The first is the variation of the barks colour and texture with age. A young sapling’s bark is paper-thin and often orange-red in colour, where as the mature tree has thick, craggy flakes of bark up to 5 cm thick and red-brown in colour. The needles of this tree grow in pairs to about 5cm in length and are blue-green in colour.
* Scots Pine performs best on drier, well-drained sites in the east of the country and also on north facing slopes in Scotland, possibly due to the wetter conditions providing protection from fires.
* Today, seed from managed seed stands provides stock of higher quality than that available from the remnant Caledonian Pine stands
* It can grow in different altitudes ranging from sea level to 2400m
* The trees can have an extensive life span of 250-300 years
* At chest height the girth can measure up to 2.4m (8ft)
* If a Scots Pine dies while standing it’s skeleton can remain for 50 to 100 years due to the high resin content in the sap, which causes slow decay.
.
The male and female flowers both grow on the tree and flower in May. The female flowers grow on the tips of the more exposed branches and the male flowers cluster together in the branches below. Once wind pollination occurs it takes 2 years for a fertilised female flower to form a fully-grown cone.
Cone production can vary with the condition of the seasons. In a season with good weather a tree can produce 3000 cones, which usually flower in April. The seeds produced by the cones can be carried as far as 50 – 100m from the parent tree and prefer exposed well-drained mineral soil to germinate.
[Source: www.greatbigtrees.com]
42
Family Pinaceae
Pinus sylvestris
The Scots Pine, commonly but incorrectly styles Scotch Fir, is the typical Pine-tree of Northern Europe, where it constitutes huge forests. Although in ancient days it was pretty widely distributed over Britain, today all those Pine woods in Southern England are the result of planting, and it is only in the Highlands of Scotland that it can be regarded as truly wild and indigenous.
............... It develops a strong taproot, which goes deep; but where the soil is shallow the taproot is not developed. At great elevations the upward growth is checked early. The branches are short and spreading, those on the lower portions of the trunk dying early, so that the tree soon gets that gaunt, weather-beaten look that is so characteristic of it. Its growth is rapid, and in twenty years it will attain a height of forty or fifty feet.
The leaves which are in bundles of two are from two to four inches long, very slender, grooved above and convex beneath. They remain on the tree for over two years, and in their first season are of a glaucous hue, but in the second year this changes to dark deep green.
Both male and female flowers are borne by the same tree. The male flowers are individually small (quarter of an inch), but are combined in spikes; this and the abundant pale yellow pollen makes them conspicuous. The female cones are somewhat egg-shaped, tapering to a point, which is often curved. They are usually in clusters of three, and grow to a length of two or three inches. The scales are comparatively few, and their ends are thickened into a four-sided boss. The seeds are winged, and contained beneath the scales. They take about eighteen months to ripen, when the scales separate in dry, windy weather, and allow the breeze to pick out the seeds and send them flying through the air to a great distance. The pollen, too, is of a form specially fitted for aerial transport, each particle of pollen forming two connected spheres. It is quite a common experience in May to find little heaps of this pale yellow pollen collected in hollows and at the margins of ponds in the neighbourhood of pine-woods.
Although the wood produced by the Scots Pine in this country is not considered of the highest quality, the species is certainly of equal value as a timber-producer with any other tree. Owing to our mild winters and long periods of seasonal growth, the Pine wood produced in Britain is coarse-grained and not very durable. In the colder parts of Northern Europe, where summers are short, and the long winters are severe, the texture of the timber is more solid and the grain closer.
In addition to the timber, other valuable substances, such as pitch and tar, resin, and turpentine, for example, are products of the Scots Pine.
Though it likes a deep soil in which to strike its taproot, it will grow upon rocky ground, or it will form forests on poor sandy soils, even on the loose hot sands near the seashore. This is a very valuable power, because the fall of its needles gradually forms a humus, and so provides food for other plants which could not exist on raw sand.
[Source: www.garden-centre.org/Pine scots.htm]
