54 PINES 



P. PiNEA AND Pinaster 



I saw fax off the dark top of a pine 

 Look like a cloud — a slender stem, the tie 

 That bound it to its native earth. . . . 



Wordsworth, The Pine on Monte Mario at Rome. 



The PiNEA (Stone, or Umbrella Pine) and the 

 Pinaster (Maritime, or Cluster Pine) run somehow 

 concurrently in some quite well-constituted minds. 

 Doubtless they should not do so, but it often happens, 

 for all that, that a tree-lover, prating on trees, gets 

 badly mixed up upon the question of their different 

 individualities. He is often prone to drift towards 

 a non-compos-mentis state of bewilderment as to 

 which is which. When he talks of the one, often as 

 not he means the other; and when he is thinking 

 of this other he wanders orally away on to the afore- 

 mentioned. Perhaps it is the similarity of names, 

 added to the similarity of locality, that they affect, 

 which is responsible for this Didymus doubt, and 

 which exercises a beguiling effect upon the dendro- 

 logist's mental equilibrium. 



The coarser leaves of the Pinaster, and its habit 

 of leaving the remains of its buds' scales on the shoots, 

 ought to assist us in arriving at its identity. In 

 addition to this, the white cottony appearance of 

 the leaf sheath, and the kind of fimbricated " frou- 

 frou " effect created about it, makes it quite different 

 from anything else of its kind. 



Both these trees have a separate claim to a notoriety 

 of their own : the P. Pinea as an artist's model, and 

 the conspicuous feature of a foreground in many a 

 Turner and Claude landscape, the Pinaster as the 

 all-conqueror of the sands ; and the way it contrives 

 to get a grip of those sands with its long perpendicular 

 roots, with undenied resolution and consolidating 

 effect, must excite the admiration of all who deem 



