Distribution. Cape May, New Jersey, through southern Delaware and eastern Maryland and southward to the shores of Indian River and Tampa Bay, Florida, westward to middle North Carolina and through South Carolina and Georgia and the eastern Gulf states to the Mississippi River, extending into southern Tennessee and northeastern Mississippi; west of the Mississippi River from southern Arkansas and the southwestern part of Oklahoma through western Louisiana to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and through eastern Texas to the valley of the Colorado River; on the Atlantic coast often springing up on lands exhausted by agriculture; west of the Mississippi River one of the most important timber-trees, frequently growing in nearly pure forests on rolling uplands.
14. [Pinus rigida] Mill. Pitch Pine.
Leaves stout, rigid, dark yellow-green, marked on the 3 faces by many rows of stomata, 3′—5′ long, standing stiffly and at right angles with the branch, deciduous during their second year. Flowers: male in short crowded spikes, yellow or rarely purple; female often clustered and raised on short stout stems, light green more or less tinged with rose color. Fruit ovoid, acute at apex, nearly sessile, often clustered, 1′—3½′ long, becoming light brown, with thin flat scales armed with recurved rigid prickles, often remaining on the branches for ten or twelve years; seeds nearly triangular, full and rounded on the sides, ¼′ long, with a thin dark brown mottled roughened shell and wings broadest below the middle, gradually narrowed to the very oblique apex, ¾′ long, ⅓′ wide.
A tree, 50°—60° or rarely 100° high, with a short trunk occasionally 3° in diameter, thick contorted often pendulous branches covered with thick much roughened bark, forming a round-topped thick head, often irregular and picturesque, and stout bright green branchlets becoming dull orange color during their first winter and dark gray-brown at the end of four or five years; often fruitful when only a few feet high. Bark of young stems thin and broken into plate-like dark red-brown scales, becoming on old trunks ¾′—1½′ thick, deeply and irregularly fissured, and divided into broad flat connected ridges separating on the surface into thick dark red-brown scales often tinged with purple. Wood light, soft, not strong, brittle, coarse-grained, very durable, light brown or red, with thick yellow or often white sapwood; largely used for fuel and in the manufacture of charcoal; occasionally sawed into lumber.
Distribution. Sandy plains and dry gravelly uplands, or less frequently in cold deep swamps; island of Mt. Desert, Maine, to the northern shores of Lake Ontario, and southward to southern Delaware and southern Ohio (Scioto County) and along the Appalachian Mountains to northern Georgia and to their western foothills in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee; very abundant in the coast region south of Massachusetts; sometimes forming pure forests in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Pinus rigida var. serotina Loud. Pond Pine. Marsh Pine.
Pinus serotina Michx.
Leaves in clusters of 3 or occasionally of 4, slender, flexuose, dark yellow-green, 6′—8′ long, marked by numerous rows of stomata on the 3 faces, deciduous during their third and fourth years. Flowers: male in crowded spikes, dark orange color; female clustered or in pairs on stout stems. Fruit subglobose to ovoid, full and rounded or pointed at apex, subsessile or short-stalked, horizontal or slightly declining, 2′—2½′ long, with thin nearly flat scales armed with slender incurved mostly deciduous prickles, becoming light yellow-brown at maturity, often remaining closed for one or two years and after opening long-persistent on the branches; seeds nearly triangular, often ridged below, full and rounded at the sides, ⅛′ long, with a thin nearly black roughened shell produced into a wide border, the wings broadest at the middle, gradually narrowed at the ends, ¾′ long, ¼′ wide.