Pinus strobus, commonly called the eastern white pine, northern white pine, white pine, Weymouth pine (British), and soft pine is a large pine native to eastern North America. It occurs from Newfoundland, Canada, west through the Great Lakes region to southeastern Manitoba and Minnesota, United States, and south along the Appalachian Mountains and upper Piedmont to northernmost Georgia and, very rarely, in some of the higher elevations in northeastern Alabama. It is listed as rare or vulnerable (S3) in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky., and as imperiled in Manitoba.
The Haudenosaunee maintain the tree as the central symbol of their multinational confederation, calling it the "Tree of Peace", where the Seneca use the name o'sóä' and the Mohawk people call it onerahtase'ko:wa. Within the Wabanaki Confederacy, the Mi'kmaq use the term guow to name the tree, both the Wolastoqewiyik and Peskotomuhkatiyik call it kuw or kuwes, and the Abenaki use the term kowa.
It is known as the "Weymouth pine" in the United Kingdom, after Captain George Weymouth of the British Royal Navy, who brought its seeds to England from Maine in 1605.
Distribution
P. strobus is widely distributed across the Great Lakes region, New England and Canada's Maritime Provinces, and along most of the Appalachian Mountain ranges. It is a irregular but frequently important component of cool-temperate, hemiboreal and southern-mid boreal forests of eastern North America. It achieves highest abundance on well-drained or sandy soils and in humid climates, but can also grow in boggy areas and rocky highlands.
Studies of both population genetics and of fossil pollen and needles in sedimentary deposits suggest that white pine's distribution at the Last Glacial Maximum (19000 to 26000 years ago) was limited to a single 'refugium' on the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, an area where it no longer occurs. Due to lowered sea level at this time, the coastline was ca. 100 km east of current locations, and the refugium likely extended into this 'revealed' land.
Eastern white pine may have been abundant in areas throughout north-central and northeastern North America, but early logging and extensive post-agricultural regeneration make it difficult to reconstruct the species' importance accurately.
Old-growth forests, or virgin stands, have been reduced to perhaps <1% of their original extent. Significant protected stands of old forests are in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Algonquin Provincial Park, Quetico Provincial Park, Algoma Highlands in Ontario, and Sainte-Marguerite River Old Forest in Quebec, Canada; Estivant Pines, Huron Mountains, Porcupine Mountains State Park, and Sylvania Wilderness Area in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, United States; Hartwick Pines State Park in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan; Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin; Lost 40 Scientific and Natural Area (SNA), Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota; White Pines State Park, Illinois; Cook Forest State Park, Hearts Content Scenic Area, Anders Run Natural Area in Pennsylvania; and the Linville Gorge Wilderness in North Carolina, United States.
Small unlogged groves or individual specimens of particularly large and old eastern white pines are found across the range of the species in the US, including in Ordway Grove, Maine; Ice Glen, Massachusetts; and Adirondack Park, New York. However, many sites with conspicuously large specimens represent advanced old-field ecological succession. The tall stands in Mohawk Trail State Forest and William Cullen Bryant Homestead in Massachusetts are examples.
As an introduced species, P. strobus is now naturalizing in the Outer Western Carpathians subdivision of the Carpathian Mountains in Czech Republic and southern Poland. It has spread from specimens planted as ornamental trees.
Description The eastern white pine is an evergreen tree with a deep, asymmetrically cylindrical crown of outstretched thin branches, gently upward angled to nearly horizontal in well-separated annual tiers. Like most members of the white pine group, Pinus subgenus Strobus, the leaves ("needles") are evergreen and occur in fascicles (bundles) of five, or rarely three or four, with a deciduous sheath. The leaves are flexible, bluish-green, finely serrated, and long.
The seed cones are slender, long (rarely longer than that) and broad when open, and have scales with a rounded apex and slightly reflexed tip. They are often resinous. The seeds are long, with a slender wing, and are dispersed by wind. Cone production peaks every 3 to 5 years in mast seeding events.
Pollen and seed cones emerge separately with new growth. Pollen cones, or strobili, can be 5–15 mm long and straw-coloured, and are arrayed in a dense band at the base of a long shoot. Seed cones are mostly 8–20 cm long, found near the tips of the long shoots, and are green before maturity. Cone maturation occurs over 2 years and seeds fall in the spring following cone initiation.
The branches are spaced about every 18 inches on the trunk in whorls with five or six branches appearing like spokes on a wagon wheel. Eastern white pine is self-fertile, but seeds produced this way tend to result in weak, stunted, and malformed seedlings. Mature trees are often 200–250 years old; the oldest reliably aged white pine was a long-dead log in Ontario which was over 400 years old at death. Many have been aged at between 300 and 400 years, and there are claims of trees approaching 500 years old.
White pines will form strong, dominant roots that are similar to taproots then will later develop lateral roots.Deuber, C. G. (1942). THE VEGETATIVE PROPAGATION OF EASTERN WHITE PINE AND OTHER FIVE-NEEDLED PINES. Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 23(2), 198–215. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43781037
Dimensions
The eastern white pine has been described as the tallest tree in eastern North America, perhaps sharing the prize with the deciduous tulip tree whose range overlaps with eastern white pine in its southern extent. In natural precolonial stands, the pine was reported to have grown as tall as or more. No means exist for accurately documenting the height of trees from these times, but eastern white pine may have reached this height on rare occasions. James Brown of Arniston, a forester and later Inspector of Woods and Forests, Port Elgin, Ontario, Canada wrote in 1882:In its native habitats this pine grows to very large dimensions. We have measured many of them as they lay felled on the ground and taking a number of them we found the stems average 150 feet long by 2 feet 9 inches diameter at 5 feet up from the bottom. This may be taken as an average of the size of the trees as they stand in their native parts; but we have found many of them that measured 210 feet long with stems from 5 to 7 feet in diameter at 4 feet up from the bottom and on counting the annular layers on the stumps from which they were cut we found them to range between 350 and 425 which may be taken as representing the years of their age.Even greater heights and diameters have been reported in numerous early town and county histories, lumber journals, and popular, but unverifiable, accounts such as Robert Pike's Tall Trees, Tough Men.
Total trunk volumes of the largest specimens are around , with some past giants possibly reaching . Photographic analysis of giants suggests volumes closer to .
Height P. strobus grows about annually between the ages of 15 and 45 years, with slower height increments before and after that age range. The tallest presently living specimens are tall, as determined by the Native Tree Society (NTS). Prior to their exploitation, it was common for white pines in northern Wisconsin to reach heights of over .
The southern Appalachian Mountains have the most locations and the tallest trees in the present range of P. strobus. One survivor is a specimen known as the "Boogerman Pine" in the Cataloochee Valley of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. At tall, it is the tallest accurately measured tree in North America east of the Rocky Mountains, though this conflicts with citations for Liriodendron tulipifera. It has been climbed and measured by tape drop by the NTS. Before Hurricane Opal broke its top in October 1995, Boogerman Pine was tall, as determined by Will Blozan and Robert Leverett using ground-based measurements.
The tallest specimens in Hartwick Pines State Park in Michigan are tall.
In the northeastern US, eight sites in four states currently have trees over tall, as confirmed by the NTS. The Cook Forest State Park of Pennsylvania has the most numerous collection of eastern white pines in the Northeast, with 110 trees measuring that height or more. The park's "Longfellow Pine" is the tallest presently living eastern white pine in the Northeast, at tall, as determined by tape drop.Luthringer, D.J. 2009. Big Trees of Cook Forest. Pennsylvania Forests 100(3):8-12. The Mohawk Trail State Forest of Massachusetts has 83 trees measuring or more tall, of which six exceed . The "Jake Swamp Tree" located there is tall.Jake Swamp Tree: 51.54m in August 2008.The Jake Swamp Tree was climbed and measured by tape drop in November 1998 and October 2001. It was scheduled to be climbed and measured a third time in November 2008. The NTS maintains precise measurements of it. A private property in Claremont, New Hampshire, has approximately 60 specimens that are at least , with the tallest being .
Diameter Diameters of the larger pines range from , which translates to a circumference (girth) range of . However, single-trunked white pines in both the Northeast and Southeast with diameters over are exceedingly rare. Notable big pine sites of or less often have no more than two or three trees in the 1.2- to 1.4-m-diameter class. Common diameter of 2–3 feet.
Unconfirmed reports from the colonial era gave diameters of virgin white pines of up to .
Ecology In mixed forests, white pine can occur as an emergent 'super-canopy' species over much of its range; it can be taller than most co-occurring hardwoods. It provides food and shelter for numerous forest birds, such as the red crossbill, and small mammals such as squirrels. Cottontail, snowshoe rabbits, and porcupines can eat the bark. Red squirrels can eat the cones by extracting the seeds. Seeds are eaten by crossbills, pine siskin, and white tailed deer.
Mortality and disease
Because the eastern white pine tree is somewhat resistant to fire, mature survivors are able to reseed burned areas. In pure stands, mature trees usually have no branches on the lower half of their trunks. The white pine weevil (Pissodes strobi) and white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola), an introduced fungus, can damage or kill these trees.
Blister rust Mortality from white pine blister rust in mature pine groves was often 50–80% during the early 20th century. The fungus must spend part of its lifecycle on alternate hosts of the genus Ribes, the native gooseberry or wild currant. Foresters proposed that if all the alternate host plants were removed, white pine blister rust might be eliminated. A very determined campaign was mounted, and all land owners in commercial pine-growing regions were encouraged to uproot and kill all native gooseberry and wild currant plants. The ramifications for wildlife and habitat ecology were of less concern at the time than timber-industry protection.
Today, native wild currants are relatively rare plants in New England, and planting wild currants or wild gooseberries is strongly discouraged, or even illegal in some jurisdictions. As an alternative, new strains of commercial currants have been developed that are highly resistant to white pine blister rust. Mortality in white pines from rust is only about 3% today.
Conservation status in the United States