Scots pine

Family

Pinaceae

Habit

Tree

Height

36.5 m

Spread

10 m

Growth

fast

Lifespan

600 years

First yield

after 13 years

Hardiness

zone 2–6

Shade tolerance

partial shade

Soil

Sand, Silt

Soil moisture

very dry – very wet

pH

4 – 7

Edible: Scots pine is no fruit tree, but it supplies several ingredients. The most important are the young, pale green May shoots: resinous and lemony in taste, they are boiled into syrup, steeped in sugar, cooked down into so-called pine honey, or used for liqueur and flavoured oil. Needles give a strongly resinous, vitamin-C-bearing tea all year round, traditionally drunk in winter. In northern Europe the inner bark was dried, ground and mixed into bread flour well into the 19th century — genuine famine food. The seeds are edible but so small that extracting them is hardly worth the effort; the pine nuts sold in shops come from the Mediterranean stone pine, not from Scots pine. One detour is worth noting: scale and bark aphids on pines secrete honeydew from which bees make dark forest honey.

Medicinal: The pine supplies two medicinally used preparations. Pine needle oil is regarded as an expectorant and is used for bronchitis and catarrh of the airways in inhalations and rubs. Turpentine oil from tapped crude balsam is antiseptic and stimulates circulation and traditionally went into rubs for rheumatic complaints — here the skin-irritant effect is the limiting factor. Bark extracts have been investigated for anti-inflammatory properties. As tradition: in northern Europe a decoction of needles and young shoots counted for centuries as a winter and anti-scurvy remedy; the fresh needles do indeed contain appreciable vitamin C. There is no evidence of efficacy in the modern sense.

Other uses: Scots pine is one of the most important timber trees in Europe. Its wood is resinous, moderately heavy and works well; the reddish heartwood is markedly more durable than the pale sapwood. It is used for structural timber, glulam, windows, doors, floorboards and furniture, and outdoors after treatment. The second great strand of use is resin: tapped crude balsam yielded turpentine oil and rosin — rare in Germany today, but still worldwide an important raw material for varnishes, adhesives and treating violin bows. Resin-soaked splints from the stem base were the lighting of poorer households into modern times. Pine needle oil is distilled from the needles; needles and cones give yellowish to green shades as a dye. The terpenes in the needle litter inhibit the germination of other plants and help explain the bare ground under dense pine stands.

Site: Scots pine demands full sun and tolerates no shading — under or close beside taller trees it goes bare from below. Soil hardly matters, with two exceptions: on sites with free lime in the topsoil or a lime horizon reachable in the subsoil, drought damage must be expected in later life, and in areas of high humidity the tree is endangered by needle cast, honey fungus and pine bud moth. Sites prone to snow break are unsuitable. In the garden plan for the final size: old pines reach up to 48 metres, shed their lower branches and drop cones and deadwood — do not place them over seating areas, paths or roofs. The needle litter acidifies the soil beneath; under the crown it is mainly bilberry, heather and mycorrhizal fungi that thrive. Pollen release in April and May is heavy and matters near sleeping and sitting areas. Care: Protect young pines against browsing; roe deer fray the young stems. Do not fertilise — feeding costs frost hardiness and dense growth, and the species is specialised in poverty. Pruning is essentially not done: pine does not resprout from old wood, and a topped crown never recovers. To steer growth, break the fresh May candles back by half with your fingers in spring while they are still soft. Remove dead lower branches at the branch collar once they are dry. Pine lappet, pine beauty moth, pine shoot beetles and pine sawflies only become a serious presence in gardens during outbreak years; the best prevention is an airy, sunny, not too crowded position. After establishment it needs no watering.

Scots pine is propagated from seed. The cones ripen in the second year after flowering and open by themselves in dry weather; collect in late winter, then loosen and de-wing the winged seed by drying and light rubbing. The seed needs light to germinate and is therefore only pressed in or covered with the thinnest sieving of soil. Stratification is not essential but improves evenness and speed: three to four weeks moist and cold at about four degrees is enough. Sow in spring into sandy, free-draining substrate without fertiliser; the seedlings carry four to seven cotyledons and are at first sensitive to waterlogging and fungal attack, but not to cold. On poor, open sandy ground natural regeneration happens by itself as soon as enough light reaches the soil. Vegetative propagation barely works — cuttings do not root, and cultivars are grafted. Seed from your own climatic region is clearly superior to imported material.

Scots pine is among the richest trees for wildlife in Central Europe, and on several levels at once. Twenty-six butterfly and moth species are recorded whose caterpillars feed on it, sixteen of them exclusively on pines — including the pine lappet and pine beauty moth, pests in commercial forestry but on a garden scale mainly food for birds and parasitic wasps. Add 29 beetle species bound to it, from pine shoot beetles to the deadwood dwellers of old trunks, and 26 bird species: crossbills prise open the cones, woodpeckers cut holes in dying trunks, and woodpeckers and squirrels spread the seed as they go. The pine is not insect-pollinated but wind-pollinated; its pollen carries air sacs and travels for kilometres. It is valuable for bees nonetheless, because the honeydew of bark and scale aphids yields dark forest honey. Below ground it forms ectomycorrhizas with fly agaric, slippery jack and saffron milkcap among others. As an evergreen it also provides cover, roosting sites and shelter from wind all year — precisely when broadleaves stand bare.

Special: Dedicated by the Germanic peoples to the goddess Sigyn, the "fire-kindling" of the Loki saga; in the Celtic tree alphabet it is Ailm, the first vowel — Merlin is said to have gained his highest wisdom in the pine of Barenton; cones open+close hygroscopically → an old weather oracle; up to 600 years old + 48m tall; ~22% of the German forest area; Tree of the Year 2007.

Europe and northern Asia. The range is one of the largest of any conifer: from north-west Spain and northern Portugal across all of central and northern Europe to Lapland, and eastwards through Siberia, south as far as Turkey. In Germany Scots pine is the most common tree species, with some 2.4 million hectares and just under 22 per cent of the forest area, concentrated in Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Lower Saxony. That picture is forestry-made, however: in north-west Germany it was barely native and occurred only in stunted form at bog margins; its natural centre lies in the continental east, in the high mountains and in the north. In elevation it runs from the plains to the high mountains.

Scots pine is the least demanding native conifer, adapted to subcontinental and continental conditions. It makes no particular demands on soil and grows from bog margins across groundwater soils and all sand and loam sites through to heavy loams and clays; its vigorous rooting lets it cope even with moderately developed pseudogleys and podzols. Its natural refuges are precisely the extremes: inland dunes, blowout hollows, bog-margin woodland and dry limestone slopes — wherever more competitive broadleaves fail. In phytosociological terms it belongs to the pine forests of the Dicrano-Pinion, Cytiso-Pinion and Erico-Pinion. As a light-demanding species it tolerates no shading. Root development is restricted only on dry, humus-poor soils, strong stagnogleys, heavy clays and podzols with a hard iron pan.