Every tree displays its beauty differently. The American Chestnut’s magnificent canopy. The Sugar Maple’s autumn color. The stark bark of a Quaking Aspen or Himalayan white birch. One of my wife’s favorites is the white pine. It is a lovely tree that grows straight and fast with fragrant, long cones and soft fluffy needles. When my father-in-law was alive he would take my daughters and look for “pinitos” or “little pines” If they found a self-seeded little tree, they would either transplant it into a pot or just wait for it to get taller.
One of the things my wife and children loved about the house we live in now was that when we bought it had three full and fluffy pines: one red and two white. (And there were lots of “pinitos” in residence for the children.) When we moved in, each tree was about 25 feet high and shielded the house from the nearby street as well as the northern winds. As we found out, however, pines are not the best trees to be near a house. They grow very quickly and soon our 25-feet trees were pushing 40 feet.
Pines are also very dirty. When the weather warms from winter to summer, the trees start dripping large quantities of hard-to-remove sap. Needles fly off in large quantities filling up gutters, window boxes, windshields, etc. And the needles don’t really compost nicely but rather become a gooey mat of impenetrable gunk daring anything to grow through or around it.
But if you don’t mind the pine detritus or the fast-growing limbs, then how a pine deals with snow or ice storms may change your mind. When pines are tiny, their limbs hang decoratively with either snow or ice bending obediently with the weight and then once their blanket is removed, spring back to their old selves. But like people, as they become older they become more brittle and hard to change in their ways: they would rather break than move. And that is what they do during winter storms.
Our first experience with this came after we were in our house for a decade and on Christmas Eve we had a large storm of heavy wet snow. The beauty of the heavy snow against the outdoor lights was counterbalanced by cracks and crashes we heard all night as the limbs of different pine trees snapped under the weight of Christmas droppings. In the morning, the arboreal destruction was vast. One of the white pines had lost at least 60 percent of its limbs. I spent Christmas morning climbing up the tree with a hand saw, taking off cracked branches all around the tree. By the time I was finished, it had a horrific hair cut and needed to be taken down.
The red pine near our driveway fared better but years later after my wife and I tired of removing pine sap daily from our cars (and delivery trucks kept knocking off lower limbs,) that one had to go too leaving us with one white pine in front of the house. But time combined with snow and ice storms formed a tree that was missing over half of its limbs and over 75 feet high; it was only 10 feet from our house. So with many reservations we recently had it taken down: first most of the limbs via a cherry picker and then the rest topped off and then dropped on a gravel parking space. Counting the rings, it was only 36 years old.
We will miss the tree as it housed many birds who flocked to our feeders, but it will be replaced by a fir that we planted a decade ago in memory of my mother-in-law. Besides, one of the pinitos is growing at the edge of my property. It’s only 10 feet tall.
