Pinus fenzeliana Seeds | Fenzel Pine
LATIN NAME: Pinus fenzeliana
COMMON NAME: Fenzel Pine
Plant Profile
Fenzel pine is one of the white pines of southern China, and the first thing a grower notices is how unlike a northern pine it looks. The needles come five to a bundle, thin, flexuous and pale blue-green, and they hang rather than bristle, so the crown reads as soft even in full sun. Cones are slender, cylindrical and resinous, ripening over two seasons and opening slowly on the tree. The bark stays smooth and grey for decades, then breaks into shallow plates. In the wild it sits on ridges and summits above the cloud line in Hainan and along the Guangdong and Guangxi border, where the air is humid, the soil is thin and acid, and the summers are long. It reaches perhaps fifteen to twenty-five metres there, often shorter and storm-pruned on exposed tops. Allied to Pinus kwangtungensis, it is treated by some authors as a variety of it, and the two intergrade where their ranges meet.
Science & Biotechnology
Pinus fenzeliana belongs to subsection Strobus, the five-needle white pines, a group whose members share a single vascular bundle per fascicle and a pronounced vulnerability to white pine blister rust, Cronartium ribicola. Because the rust is native to Asia and lethal to many North American white pines, Asian species such as this one are screened in resistance-breeding programmes, and the results are used to interpret what allows a pine to survive infection. Wood anatomy places it with the soft pines: even-grained, pale, low in resin. Its chromosome count is 2n = 24 like the rest of the genus, and molecular phylogenies nest it close to P. kwangtungensis and P. armandii rather than with the hard pines of the same mountains. Seed physiology is orthodox: the seed tolerates drying to low moisture and stores for years at 4 degrees, which is why ex situ collections are straightforward.
Uses & Benefits
The timber is light, straight and easy to work, and in Hainan it goes into construction, furniture cores and general carpentry, though the volumes available are small. More important locally is the part the tree plays in watershed cover on granite ridges, where its litter and its roots slow runoff during the typhoon season. In gardens outside the tropics it is a collector’s pine, grown for the blue-green five-needle foliage, the slender cones and the smooth bark, and used as a bonsai subject in southern China, where the long flexible needles can be shortened by careful candle pruning. It has no medicinal record of its own, unlike the hard pines whose resin and pollen fill the pharmacopoeia. The seed is eaten in some districts, but never in quantity, and it is not a commercial nut.
Growing from Seed
Sow in late winter or early spring after eight weeks of cold, moist stratification; fresh seed germinates in three to six weeks at 18 to 22 degrees. Use an acid mix of leaf mould, coarse sand and a little loam, and keep it open enough that water runs straight through. The seedlings resent soggy roots more than they resent drought, so water deeply and then let the surface dry. Give them full light from the start, because shaded white pine seedlings grow soft and etiolated and are then vulnerable to damping off. Repot after the first flush has hardened, taking care not to disturb the taproot more than necessary. Plant out when the seedling is thirty to forty centimetres, in a sheltered spot for the first winter, and expect ten to fifteen centimetres of growth a year for the first few seasons before it accelerates. It will not tolerate chalk or ground that stands wet in winter.
Our Take
Grow it for the foliage and the smooth trunk rather than for timber, and give it acid soil and air moving through the crown. A tree for mild gardens and patient growers.
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