Tree Tuesday: A Pine for Robbie

This lithe dancer on the snowswept stage of Parc Angrignon is none other than the Scots pine. Aptly enough, given the recent celebration of 250 years since the birth of fellow Scot, poet Robbie Burns, this tree, bright orange and green on a faded winter pallet, leapt to my attention.

I don’t usually pay much attention to Scots pines. Perhaps because their identity on this continent has been monopolized by their role as most popular Christmas tree and the pine to be planted where none other will take hold, this once proud and tall tree of the European boreal forest doesn’t usually get beyond my peripheral vision. The lofty white pine, Pinus strobus, of Group of Seven fame, aristocrat of the rocky hill, North American native, already occupies the seat of the pine in my heart.

Now however, having met this dancer, having observed her as much as the frigid temperatures and the deep snow would allow, I’ll make more room for this pine, Pinus sylvestrus, in Latin, pin sylvestre, in French, both meaning pine of the forest. Never having seen a Scots pine forest, I was surprised to learn of this meaning. Aside from those in the Christmas tree farms, Scots pines struck me as loners; living in small clusters at best. But, as I’ve learned in my Internet travels, this tree once dominated the forests of Scotland. Its decimation for firewood, then for the English navy, then to clear the way for sheep, prompted the English to look eastward in the European boreal forest, for new supplies. Riga, for instance, was a major port of trade in Scots pine lumber and pitch, or resin, for the English although the people who would become Latvians called it Riga pin.

For you see, while we of the English-speaking world think of this pine as a Scot, the rest of Europe and Russia do not. Pinus sylvestrus, only begins – or ends, depending on your location – in the Scottish highlands. Its territory extends east almost to the Pacific, north to Siberia and south to the Mediterranean; this pine covers more territory than any other. Tolerant of cold, heat and drought, the Scots pine balks only at shade and consistently wet soil.
Ironically, the Scots who immigrated to the maritime colonies and to Lower and Upper Canada in the early 19th century — having been cleared off their land, much like their namesake of a pine — were among the lumberjacks who cleared the new land of white pine, Pinus strobus or pin blanc. As the effects of globalization would have it, once Napoleon took control of the Baltic ports in 1812 and the English lost access to their Riga pine, they turned to British North America, and the decimation of the white pine began.

But let’s return to our contemporary Scot. First planted in Quebec in 1912, the tree, though a fast-grower, proved disappointing for lumber, largely because it didn’t necessarily grow straight. Thanks to its resistance to extreme conditions, however,  the Scots pine was valued for curbing erosion and creating windbreaks.

It’s not until the post Second World War period, when the rapid urbanization of North American meant fewer people could chop forest evergreens to make a Christmas tree, that the Scots pine finds its place in plantations. That said, the tree has long had a following among landscapers, precisely for the unpredictable and attractive forms its rusty orange trunk would assume.

In fact, it’s possible that the tree pictured, which is part of a large clump of well-established Scots pines, may well be a vestige from a windbreak hedge from the time of the Crawford family who farmed the land now called Parc Angrignon between 1842 and 1911.

In many a Montreal park, you will find Scots pine, easily identified by the colour of the bark and by the needles. In clusters of two, the bluish-green needles have a twist to them and measure only four to eight centimetres. In the centre of the city, there’s a particularly strangely sculpted group of Scots pine in Parc La Fontaine, just to the east of the entrance to École Le Plateau.