Pinus

Austrian pine (Pinus nigra), also called European black pine, is a dense, dark, 40-to-60-foot conifer from central and southern Europe into western Asia, with stiff dark green needles three to six inches long in bundles of two and bark that darkens to nearly black on mature trunks. For most of the twentieth century it was the default tough conifer of North American landscapes: it takes clay, drought, salt and city air, and Missouri Botanical Garden still lists urban tolerance among its attributes. That reputation is now out of date, and the reason is a disease. Sphaeropsis - Diplodia - tip blight kills the new shoots from the bottom of the tree upward, hollowing out the crown over years, and it is severe enough that Missouri Botanical Garden explicitly no longer recommends planting Austrian pine in the St. Louis area or the wider Midwest. Dothistroma needle blight and pine wilt nematode compound it. It remains a legitimate choice on the drier, cooler, less humid end of its range; specifying it into a humid continental summer is planting a tree with a known ending.

A native northern + eastern North American evergreen conifer producing long soft blue-green needles in fascicles of 5 - the soft-needled "pine of the East" as distinct from harder-needled red pine + pitch pine. Among the largest eastern conifers - old-growth specimens exceed 150 feet. Fast-growing for an evergreen. Salt + air-pollution sensitive; site away from roads.

Jack pine (Pinus banksiana) is a scrubby northern pine that grows further north in Canada than any other native pine, and Missouri Botanical Garden uses the word scrubby without apology. It is 35 to 50 feet at best, often much less and often crooked, with short stiff olive-green needles barely an inch and a half long in bundles of two and strongly curved cones to two and a half inches. It is not a handsome specimen tree and should not be sold as one. What it is instead is a species that will hold ground almost nothing else will: dry sterile sand, burned-over barrens, thin acid soil across the boreal edge. Its cones are serotinous, sealed with resin and capable of hanging closed on the branch for a decade or more until a fire opens them and seeds the burn - so the whole tree is built around catastrophe rather than around continuity. And it carries one of the most specific wildlife dependencies in North America: the rare Kirtland's warbler breeds only in dense tracts of young jack pine under about twenty feet, almost entirely in northern Michigan.

Loblolly pine (Pinus taeda) is the most planted tree in the United States, and almost none of that planting is gardening - it is the backbone of the southern timber industry, grown by the million for pulp, plywood and construction lumber. As a garden tree it is a fast, straight-trunked evergreen of 40 to 50 feet in cultivation, reaching 90 feet or more in the wild, with dark yellow-green needles five to ten inches long carried in bundles of three. Its distinguishing quality is a tolerance most large conifers lack: it wants moist, acidic, badly drained ground, and Missouri Botanical Garden lists it for rain gardens and low wet areas rather than for a dry lawn. The name says the same thing - a loblolly is a mudhole. Two limits matter. It is a zone 6 to 9 tree that is not reliably winter hardy even as far north as St. Louis, and its speed comes with the usual cost: it is a screen and a shade tree rather than a specimen, and bark beetles find stressed trees quickly.

Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) is really three trees under one name, and choosing it without knowing which one you mean is the commonest mistake made about it. Inland, as var. latifolia, it is the tall, extraordinarily slender Rocky Mountain lodgepole that grows in dense even-aged stands after fire - straight enough that Indigenous peoples used it for tipi poles, which is where the common name comes from. On the Pacific coast, as var. contorta, it is a low, crooked, wind-sculpted shore pine of dunes and bogs that may never exceed thirty feet; the epithet contorta describes that form, not the inland one. In the Sierra Nevada it is var. murrayana, somewhere between the two. Across all of them the species shares a willingness to grow where other conifers will not - nutrient-poor sand, acid bog margins, even the hot mineral ground around geyser basins - and a fire ecology built on cones that stay sealed until heat opens them. It is also the tree at the centre of the mountain pine beetle epidemic that has killed lodgepole across tens of millions of acres of western North America since the late 1990s.

A long-lived, fire-dependent pine of the Southern Coastal Plain, once the dominant tree across tens of millions of acres of open, grassy pine savanna from Virginia to east Texas. It is named for its very long (8-18 inch) needles, which grow in bundles of three and give the tree a distinctive open, tufted look, and for its large 6-10 inch cones. Longleaf is famous for its multi-year "grass stage": for several years after germination a seedling looks like a clump of grass, putting energy into a deep taproot and a fire-resistant bud at ground level before it ever shoots upward. That makes it slow to establish but exceptionally storm-, drought-, and fire-tolerant once grown. This is a large restoration and landscape conifer, not a quick ornamental - plant it for the long term.

Mugo pine (Pinus mugo) is the low, spreading mountain pine of central and southern Europe, and almost everyone meets it in the wrong form. In the wild it is a sprawling, multi-stemmed shrub or small tree of the Alps and Carpathians that forms dense krummholz thickets above the treeline, growing wider than tall and reaching 15 to 20 feet high with a 25-to-30-foot spread. In garden centres it is a neat green bun in a small pot, and the gap between the two is the single biggest cause of disappointment with this plant: unnamed seed-grown stock sold as a dwarf will keep growing for decades and eventually swallow the foundation bed it was planted in. Buy a named dwarf cultivar and it is genuinely excellent - dense, dark, deer-resistant, cold-hardy to zone 2, and one of the few reliable evergreens for a rock garden, a windswept slope or a large container. Buy an unnamed one and you have planted a mountain shrub against your house.

The dominant pine of the western United States - a large, long-lived conifer that grows in a conical form to 60 to 125 feet in cultivation and far taller in the wild. Mature trunks wear distinctive bright yellowish-brown to reddish-orange bark furrowed into broad scaly plates, often smelling of vanilla or butterscotch on warm days. Dark yellow-green needles up to 10 inches long crowd the branch ends in bundles of three, and the species is highly drought- and deer-tolerant once established.

Red pine (Pinus resinosa) is the straight-trunked northern pine of sandy hills and glacial plains, 50 to 80 feet tall and only 20 to 25 feet wide, with a conical crown, horizontal branching and bark that is genuinely red-tinged from crown to base - which is where the name comes from, since the needles are ordinary dark green. It carries two of the cleanest identification tests in the genus. The needles are four to six inches long in bundles of two, and they are brittle in a specific way: bend one and it snaps crisply in half rather than folding, which no other pine in its range does. It is the tree of the great Depression-era plantations across the Upper Midwest and Ontario, planted in rows on sand that had been logged and burned, and much of what looks like red pine forest is that planting. The honest limit is heat. Missouri Botanical Garden rates it zones 2 to 5 and does not recommend it for landscape planting south of zone 5, because hot humid summers defeat it - this is a tree for cold winters and cool summers, and nowhere else.

Scots pine is the only pine native to northern Europe and one of the most widely distributed conifers in the world, ranging from Scotland and Spain across Eurasia to eastern Siberia and Mongolia. It is a long-lived, architectural tree prized for its distinctive orange-red upper bark, glaucous blue-green paired needles, and sculptural open crown that develops with age. In the garden it delivers year-round structure and strong wildlife value, but the honest catch is scale and mess: at full size it easily tops 60 to 80 feet, drips resin, sheds persistent acidic needle litter that suppresses ground-layer planting beneath it, and in parts of eastern North America and New Zealand it is listed as an invasive species that can spread into open habitats.