Pinus

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.

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.

The dominant pine of the western United States — a large, long-lived conifer that grows in a conical form to 60-125 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.