Sunday Afternoon Post: Looking Like A Southern Pine

Just a little picture today to keep the blog going.  When I will reference comparisons between pines in the coming posts, I probably will be bringing up the noble Red quite a lot.  Here she is:

Such a lovely, open crown.  This was taken in Ontario, home of the best Red Pines.  Sorry, Minnesota. 

Red Pines (Pinus Resinosa) are definitely a creature of the north, not making it farther south than Milwaukee in the west and sticking to the mountains only as far south as Scranton in the east (with an isolated anomaly in West Virginia), but they bear a striking resemblance to the Loblolly Pine (Pinus Taeda), which never even come 100 miles near each other at the closest extremities of their range.  While it might be interesting to think of the two trees as subspecies of one another, the Red Pine has needles in clusters of two, while the Loblolly keeps them in threes.  Their cones are also a bit different, with the Red Pine's being brittle and open, and the Loblolly's being spiny, tough, and closed. 

Other than that, they present a similar crown profile in advanced stages of growth, with nice globular masses of needles arranged as if they were ornaments on the trees.  They both like things well-drained and even exposed and windy, the Red Pine being immune to the worst of winter cold and the Lobolly able to handle the worst of southern summer heat.  They also get treated as second fiddle to the two botanically worshiped pines of their same ecosystems, The Eastern White (Pinus Strobus) for the Red and the Longleaf (Pinus Palustris) for the Loblolly.