Stone pine - Organic Answers Column January 8, 2025
Italian Stone Pine - From Holiday to Everyday Tree
The largest Italian stone pine in the Dallas area
When it comes to making landscaping choices for North Texas yards, a mix of deciduous and evergreen trees offers year-round green when the leaves have fallen, and gives an interesting texture to the space. Texas has lots of evergreen trees, cedar (juniper) in Central and North Texas, straight-trunked tall pine trees in East Texas, and gnarly desert evergreens in West Texas. If you want to plant pines in North Texas yards, you'll find several ornamental varieties offered at area nurseries, but which to choose?
For this region, choosing pines that are best suited means taking into account soil depth and type (black and white or sandy, acidic or not), rainfall, and the final size of the mature tree. Area nurseries often carry such plants as Japanese Black Pine, but those prefer more acid soil than is typically found in this region and suffer when they are planted over white rock. The same can be said of the East Texas pine species. And a lot of Dirt Doctor ink has been spilled about the problems of planting introduced desert pines such as the Eldarica or Afghan pine, that suffer from drainage problems and too much rain.
Stone pine - from juvenile short single spiky needles (left) to a few years old with mature
needle bundles
For many years now the Italian Stone Pine has been available in the holiday season in small pots as living Christmas trees. Those conical trees, up to about 5 - 10 years old, have different leaves, that look and feel more like small spruce trees. The Pinus pinea immature needles are single (not paired, as in maturity), are 3⁄4 to 1 1⁄2 inch long, and are a muted blue-green. Adult leaves that grow in bundles of two and are 4 - 8 inches long appear mixed with juvenile leaves from the fourth or fifth year on, replacing them fully by around the tenth year. The juvenile leaves can appear on mature trees in situations of regrowth following injury or pruning.
Also called the Mediterranean stone pine, umbrella pine and parasol pine, these southern European transplants grow well in USDA Zones 7a - 11. A tree with horticultural importance from the Mediterranean region, it has been introduced to many similar climate zones around the world.
Stone pine about 18 years old (Photo: Maggie Dwyer)
The young stone pine has a rounded shape, branching from the ground up, but the mature trees will have dropped the lower branches resulting in a broad, smoothly rounded to nearly flat top. This conifer can exceed 80 feet in height, but 40 - 65 ft is more typical here. The mid-age to mature tree takes the shape of an umbrella canopy on a thick trunk, and in maturity the broad crown can be well over 25 ft wide. The largest example of a mature stone pine in Dallas can be found near Love Field, and the trees thrive as far north as Denton.
The cones take three years to mature, the pine nuts (seeds) are delicious
(Seed photo by Burgkirsch from Wikimedia)
Stone pines take more than 10 years to start forming cones that are broad and egg-shaped, 3 - 6 in long, and take 36 months to mature, longer than any other pine. The edible pine nuts have been used since prehistoric times and is now raised horticulturally for the 3/4 inch long seeds, called variously pine nuts, piñones, pinhões, pinoli, or pignons, and also for resin and tannins from the bark.
There are few problems with stone pines; this is a large tree that seems to be able to thrive in a variety of soils, even dry alkaline soils. While they are pretty hardy, they can sustain damage in North Texas' severe cold weather.
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