THE WHITE PINE 



IN many respects the White Pine is the most important timber tree which the American 

 Continent has produced. It has been preeminently the tree producing lumber for 

 building purposes, having the qualities that adapted it to a great variety of uses. 

 During recent years the available supply has become more and more limited so that the 

 price has rapidly risen and the lumber can no longer be used for many of the purposes to 

 which it was formerly applied. Original forests of this tree are becoming more and more 

 scarce and where they exist in centres of population they become a place of pilgrimage, 

 as in the case of the famous White Pine grove at Carlisle, Massachusetts. 



The White Pine has such distinctive characteristics that the tree is known to every 

 one who has paid the slightest attention to the plant world. It is at once distinguished 

 at a distance from the Norway Pine and the Pitch Pine by the comparative fineness of 

 its foliage, the slender needles, arranged in clusters of five, being borne along the sides of 

 comparatively slender branches that sweep out horizontally with their tips commonly 

 curving upwards. As seen close at hand these needles show two or three distinct whitish 

 lines on the lower surfaces as well as a very finely serrated margin. The young twigs are 

 brownish, more or less covered with a fine pubescence, while the older twigs are smooth 

 and shining. The cones are very characteristic, being long and comparatively slender, 

 with their scales enlarged toward the outer end but rather thin at the tip. The winged 

 seeds are light brown in color. 



The White Pine is essentially a Northern tree, its original range extending from 

 Newfoundland to Ontario and Southern Manitoba, thence going southward to Minnesota, 

 Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, and following the Alleghany Mountains into Georgia. In many 

 parts of this territory primeval forests of White Pine formerly covered vast areas, but 

 these have been almost wholly cut down. Much attention has of late been given to reforest- 

 ing some of these areas, and the White Pine is deservedly popular for forest planting as 

 well as for use in landscape gardening. In areas protected from fire the species very 

 often spreads naturally from seed trees, the seedlings getting a start in the shade of the 

 Aspens and other trees that occur in abandoned pasture lands. In reforesting by 

 man, however, it is better to set out nursery grown seedlings than to attempt to grow 

 from seed sown on the land to be forested. 



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