White pine was originally a key player in the Great Lakes and New England ecosystems. A few little outliers of them also spilled westward into what became northeast Iowa. I know of no evidence that it grew around here in southeast Iowa, within the last millennia. But we now plant it extensively around here because it is fast-growing, attractive, long lived, and useful to wildlife and us. Its main predators are deer when the tree is young, and some sort of blight, which occasionally kills individuals. The wood is brittle, and storms passing through can leave a trail of branches and sometimes tops. But the tree is resilient and often an upper branch will slowly bend upward and become a new top, and as the tree gets older it will have a distinctive little jog in its trunk where this happened.
In a previous blog, I mentioned planting of local farm windbreaks more than a century ago. Today let us take a little tour through the life cycle of a white pine.
When the tree is young, each year’s growth of new branches forms a single radial whorl, like the spokes of a wagon wheel, usually 6-10 branches in each horizontal whorl, with a bare trunk above and below.
The spacing between the whorls of branches reveals past growth. If only a few inches between whorls, the tree has had a tough life, perhaps growing in a crack in a granite outcrop with a short growing season in southern Canada. But here in southeast Iowa, with deep soils, adequate rainfall, and lush summer days, it is not uncommon for white pine to put on as much as three feet of main trunk growth in a single year. As they get taller, they stick up into more aggressive winds, and lose small branches and their shape becomes more irregular – often evolving into pagoda-like layers.
Native to Muscatine County, at Wildcat Den.
I’d guess (others know better) it was in the thirties that some itinerant salesman or a conservation program persuaded farmers along Rt. 13 between Manchester and the Edgewood intersection to plant the pines which now survive in scattered clumps along property road edges and at cemeteries. A cheering sight.
The settler on what is now Eden Valley Refuge in Clinton County south of Baldwin planted an entire hillside with pines, carrying water by the bucket to keep them happy the first couple of years. Several survive nicely among hardwoods coming in behind.
Here in Iowa City I’ve had good luck with a pair of columnar white pines, as fast-growing as Lon notes, and I’m hoping perhaps a bit less resistant to wind until the tops become vulnerable That’s to be seen. They’re now at perhaps 10′ each.
10-4 Lon on your white pine observations. We’ve had quite a bit of experience with them in far NE Iowa. Beautiful trees indeed, but they grow too fast for their own good. As you note, the wood is brittle and weak. We lost the tops out of some in a windstorm this summer that we planted 30 years ago.
We’ve also noted that yellow-bellied sapsuckers are fond of white pines. Their characteristic drilling of parallel rows of holes in the trunk results in the introduction of fungal decay. Often where the top half of the tree has been snapped off in a windstorm is where the tree was drilled years earlier by a sapsucker.
One final note, they regenerate from their own seed very well. We have some CRP next to white pines. On the downwind side of the cone-bearing pines and outward for 100-plus yards there is an abundance of volunteer white pines growing in the CRP. If I see one I especially like, I slap a sturdy woven wire fence around it. Otherwise, they don’t stand a chance with the resident deer.
Hello Casey, Was this established by pioneer diaries or counting tree rings or…? Cheers, Lon
Hello Alan, If your columnars are putting less wood into branches, are they putting more into trunks? Cheers, Lon
Hello George, I wonder whether the “original” distribution of white pine was controlled mainly by deer, elk, and bison. Cheers, Lon
It seems pretty likely Lon, though given the rapid growth it’s hard from to tell. Come by to make you own estimate next time your shoping at HyVee?