The Ever Landscape-able Eastern White Pine

Among my strong dislikes of artificial landscape elements would be the ever-present use of exotic trees in orderly plantings.  I drove past countless yards today which had proper little rows of Blue Spruce (Picea Pungens) and Lombardy Poplar (Populus Nigra v. Italica) and had to wonder whatever became of the great eastern North American tree rush that conquered the hearts of so many landscapers back in the 17th and 18th centuries.  That said, I passed by just as many Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), and to be fair, such trees are often landscaped to death in their native range, and often well outside of it as well, deep into the Great Plains.  They do make excellent stand-alone specimens for landscaping, though.

Somewhere near Kalkaska, Michigan.  

It's hard not to share a picture like this, or not to make a post about it, even if I have done something similar before.  I mean come on, its so strong, yet graceful...

Oddly enough, very few of them get planted out west, and despite their natural occurrence in Mexico, they are also quite absent there.  As noted, they made appearances into quite a few landscaped European estates in former centuries, and were long celebrated by the British navy as excellent mast trees.  These days I have only really noticed them around in England here and there, but apparently they have made such inroads into parts of eastern Europe that they have naturalized, especially in the Carpathian mountains.  Fitting revenge, I would say, for the sheer number of Norwegian Spruce (Picea All-too-common-a) that we became afflicted with here.