Pinus pinaster Seeds | Maritime Pine
LATIN NAME: Pinus pinaster
COMMON NAME: Maritime Pine
Plant Profile
The needles are borne strictly in pairs — never three or five — in a papery sheath that persists at the base, and they are long, stiff and a grey-blue green, often longer than a hand and among the longest of the European pines. On a young shoot they crowd at the tips of the branches, which gives the tree its alternative name of cluster pine. The needles stay on the branch for two or three seasons, so the crown carries several year-classes at once and looks dense without being fine.
The lower trunk is clad in thick, deeply fissured, reddish-brown plates that insulate the living tissue from a fast grass fire. Behind the bark lies an elaborate system of resin ducts, and it is these ducts that made the species the resin tree of France: wounding the trunk cuts the horizontal ducts, and the oleoresin drains into the fresh scar.
The cones are large, egg-shaped and almost stalkless, sitting tight against the branch, and they take two seasons to mature. In several populations they are serotinous: the scales stay sealed with resin long after the seed is ripe, and the cones open only after a fire has baked them. On a burnt slope the whole canopy can drop its seed in a single event, which is why maritime pine regenerates so well after fire and so poorly beneath an unburnt canopy.
Two pests define the risk in a maritime pine stand. The pine processionary moth lays its eggs on the needles and the larvae build white silken nests on the branches, walking nose to tail in a column when they move; their hairs cause skin and eye irritation in people and animals, so nests are handled with gloves or not at all. The scale insect Matsucoccus feytaudi attacks the bark of the trunk and branches and killed vast areas of pine in Provence after it spread there in the twentieth century, leaving grey stands of dead trees behind it.
Science & Biotechnology
The volatile fraction of the oleoresin is dominated by alpha-pinene and beta-pinene, with carene and limonene present in smaller amounts, and the non-volatile part is a mixture of diterpene resin acids of the abietane and pimarane types. Distilling the oleoresin separates turpentine from rosin, and the species is a standard subject in forestry research on resin yield and duct anatomy. Thinning a stand increases the resin flow of the remaining trees, because a wider crown means more ducts per trunk.
Uses & Benefits
Tapping, known locally as gemmage, shaped the working year in the Landes: a resin gatherer cut a fresh wound upwards on one face of the trunk, collected the oleoresin in a clay pot, and returned to lift the strip a little higher. The trade collapsed in the second half of the twentieth century when cheap synthetic resins and imported turpentine replaced the natural product, and most of the forest is now grown for timber and pulp instead. Traces of the old faces are still visible on old trunks as a scarred vertical panel on one side.
Portugal grows maritime pine as an industrial crop on poor, acidic, sandy soils, harvesting on a rotation of a few decades for sawlogs, pallets, plywood and pulp. The tree suits that land because it tolerates low fertility and salt wind, and its roots reach deep into the sand. Growth is rapid on a good site, and the species has been planted well beyond its native range in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Chile, where it is now treated as an invasive problem in fynbos and coastal scrub.
Growing from Seed
Half of the pine forest of south-western France exists because a swamp was drained and sown with one species. Through the middle of the nineteenth century the coastal plain of the Landes was a shifting, feverish marsh, and a combination of drainage channels and systematic sowing converted it into the largest artificial pine wood in Europe. The same tree then held the dunes of the Atlantic coast in place, and its resin paid for the villages that had grown up among it.
Sow in late winter on a prepared, weed-free seedbed, covering the seed by about twice its own thickness and firming the sand. A light mulch of pine litter holds moisture without caking. A spell of cold, moist storage before sowing evens out emergence, and seed that has been kept warm and dry will come up raggedly over a long period instead. Plant out as a small bare-root or container plant while the root collar is still thin, wire or stake the seedling if deer and rabbits are about, and keep the ground clear of competing grass for the first two seasons. Thin the stand early to leave the best stems room, and prune the lower branches of the chosen trees while they are thumb-thick if clear timber is the aim.
The species will not regenerate under its own canopy: the seedlings need bare mineral soil and full light. Any attempt at natural regeneration therefore depends on exposing the ground, by scarifying, burning or grazing, rather than on leaving a gap to fill by itself.
Our Take
Plant it where the wind blows and the soil is thin, and it will look better than anything you could put there instead. For contrast in the same genus, see our notes on stone pine, grown for its edible kernels, and lacebark pine, whose trunk sheds in camouflage patches. If you garden in a cold winter climate, Chinese pine is a hardier substitute for the same role.
Related Reading
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