Pinus pungens

Lambert 1805

Common names

Table Mountain pine, mountain pine (Kral 1993), hickory pine.

Taxonomic notes

This species belongs to subgenus Pinus, subsection Australes Loudon, clade Taeda (Cruz-Nicolás et al. 2024). This clade is comprised of species found in the SE US.

Description

"Trees to 12 m; trunk to 0.6 m diam., straight to crooked, erect to leaning, poorly self-pruning; crown irregularly rounded or flattened. Bark red- to gray-brown, irregularly checked into scaly plates. Branches horizontally spreading; twigs slender, orange- to yellow-brown, aging darker brown, rough. Buds ovoid to cylindric, red-brown, 0.6-0.9 cm, resinous. Leaves 2(-3) per fascicle, spreading or ascending, persisting 3 years, 3-6(-8) cm × 1-1.5 mm, twisted, deep yellow-green, all surfaces with fine stomatal lines, margins harshly serrulate, apex acute to short-acuminate; sheath 0.5-1 cm, base persistent. Pollen cones ellipsoid, ca. 15mm, yellow. Seed cones maturing in 2 years, variably serotinous, mostly whorled, downcurved, asymmetric, ovoid before opening, broadly ovoid when open, (4-)6-10 cm, gray- to pale red-brown, nearly sessile or on stalks to 1cm; apophyses thickened, diamond-shaped, strongly keeled, elongate, mammillate at cone base abaxially; umbo central, a stout, curved, sharp claw. Seeds deltoid-obovoid, oblique; body ca. 6 mm, deep purple-brown to black; wing 10-20(-30) mm. 2n=24" (Kral 1993). See García Esteban et al. (2004) for a detailed characterization of the wood anatomy.

Distribution and Ecology

USA: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia in the Appalachian Mountains and associated Piedmont at 500-1350 m elevation. Habitat dry, mostly sandy or shaly uplands (Kral 1993). See also Thompson et al. (1999). Hardy to Zone 6 (cold hardiness limit between -23.2°C and -17.8°C) (Bannister and Neuner 2001).

Distribution data from USGS (1999). Points represent isolated or approximate locations.

Remarkable Specimens

The largest known has diameter 78 cm, height 29 m, crown spread 14 m, located in Stokes County, North Carolina (American Forests 1996). The three tallest known ones are in Paris Mountain State Park, South Carolina; they are 26.85 to 29.96 m tall (Rucker 2003).

There are few age data, but Pederson (2006) reports a crossdated age of 232 years for specimen GKA111 collected at Griffith Knob, Virginia by G. DeWeese, H. Grissino-Mayer, and C. Lafon.

Ethnobotany

Used for pulpwood and firewood (Kral 1993).

Observations

Remarks

The final scene of the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans takes place in a nice P. pungens stand within Chimney Rock State Park in North Carolina.

Citations

American Forests 1996. The 1996-1997 National Register of Big Trees. Washington, DC: American Forests.

Cruz-Nicolás, Jorge, Juan Pablo Jaramillo-Correa, and David S. Gernandt. 2024. Stochastic processes and changes in evolutionary rate are associated with diversification in a lineage of tropical hard pines (Pinus). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 192:108011, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2024.108011.

Lambert, A. B. 1805. On a new species of Pinus. Ann. Bot. (Koenig & Sims) 2:198.

Pederson, Neil. 2006. Eastern OLDLIST: A database of maximum tree ages for Eastern North America. http://people.eku.edu/pedersonn/OLDLISTeast, accessed 2006.09.08, now defunct.

See also

Elwes and Henry 1906-1913 at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This series of volumes, privately printed, provides some of the most engaging descriptions of conifers ever published. Although they only treat species cultivated in the U.K. and Ireland, and the taxonomy is a bit dated, still these accounts are thorough, treating such topics as species description, range, varieties, exceptionally old or tall specimens, remarkable trees, and cultivation. Despite being over a century old, they are generally accurate, and are illustrated with some remarkable photographs and lithographs.

Gucker, Corey. 2007. Early postfire response of southern Appalachian Table Mountain-pitch pine stands to prescribed fires in North Carolina and Virginia. http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/research_project_summaries/Welch00/all.html, accessed 2009.03.28.

Knebel ond Wentworth (2007).

FEIS database.