Flowering Red Pine
I am not much of a naturalist, as much as I love to be outdoors and away from crowds of people. I know lots of people who can identify all kinds of different natural things and I hold some envy of them. I usually just look at the whole picture. But there are two kinds of pine trees that I have been able to identify since a very early age, five or maybe even three. My granddaddy took me and a few cousins for a walk down the back road to about the Three Sisters and he showed us how to tell the difference between red and white pine trees. Red pines have groups of two needles, white have groups of five. Red pines have a rough, reddish bark, white have a smoother bark without any hint of red. The cones are different too, and the general shape of the trees. I don’t know how accurate this memory is. It may even be a composite of different memories. But I have always known how to tell red and white pine trees apart. And I have never noticed a red pine “flowering” like the one in the pic, from a little plantation at the Beaver Creek foot trail:
May 28th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
oooooh!!
May 28th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
According to my mom, G’ma J – the greenest of green thumbs – all plants have a flower of some sort. Just some of the flowers are a lot more difficult to find than others….
May 29th, 2007 at 7:45 am
That is such a cool picture of the red pine! When I read this blog entry, though, my botany class from good ‘ol Moo U reared its ugly sleeping self and said:
“Wait! Pines are gymnosperms, (naked seeds), not angiosperms (flowering plants).”
A quick check of Wikipedia found these two entries, including a picture of another pine w/ male pollen cones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conifer_cone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinophyta
May 29th, 2007 at 7:57 am
Yawk! Basically, most of that goes straight over my head with a great big wooshing noise. It all seemed so simple all those years ago. 😉
May 30th, 2007 at 8:19 am
But for all that, you remember how to tell white from red pine!
I must not have clicked in at first on HOW to remember stuff in that botany class, b/c I’m still very weak on the conifers, but I remember more from the later classes. It was a fun class b/c we usually marched around campus or through the greenhouses instead of always being inside a lecture hall. Then there was the day that we got caught in a thunderstorm and got completely drenched. My next class was in Holmes Hall, and I didn’t have time to run back to Water’s Edge to change. So I walked up to the desk at Holmes, told them I was Joyce Regenstreif, gave them my mom’s maiden name, and made up a student ID number. They gave me the key to Jay’s room, and I borrowed some dry clothes. When I came back after class, Jay said she thought someone had been there, but couldn’t really tell why.