I was at the Portland Chapter meeting of the Native Plant
Society recently and someone there told me that the gray pine (Pinus sabiniana) was an Oregon native. This was
news to me. It’s not listed in Trees to
Know in Oregon, from the Oregon State University Extension Service. Also, Ronald
Lanner writes in Conifers of California
that gray pine is “…a native to California
alone – without any Nevada or Oregon outliers.” (p.
71) He goes on to quote David Douglas on the discovery of the gray pine: “I have
added a most interesting species to the genus Pinus, P. sabinii, one which I had first discovered in 1826, and
lost, together with the rough notes, in crossing a rapid stream.” However,
David Douglas was not in California
in 1826. He was in the Umpqua Valley area of Oregon
in search of sugar pine, where he must have also seen some gray pine. The
“rapid stream” he crossed was the Santiam
River
Frank Callahan documents the discovery of the gray pine in Oregon . He reports that
a railroad survey in 1855 recorded them growing in Jackson County Oregon
after collecting specimens near Gold Hill. Callahan notes numerous specimens
that he has located in the Medford
area. (See Frank Callahan, “Discovering Gray Pine (Pinus sabiniana) in Oregon,”
Kalmiopsis Volume 16, 2009.
The gray pine is a distinctive pine with long, gray-green
needles. Its most distinctive feature is the size of its large, heavy cones. They
are usually visible it the top branches of the tree, where they remain for
several years after they mature. The cones have the largest seeds of any
conifer in the Pacific Northwest . The
nutritional seeds were harvested by Native Americans, although too few trees
grew in Oregon
for them to be an important food source. Since the seeds are too large to be
dispersed far from the tree, the gray pine relies on birds to disperse the
seeds. Gray pine seeds are a favorite food of the Steller’s jay and scrub jay,
which store seeds in the ground to eat later. Since the jays never recover all
the seeds, they also plant the next generation of gray pines.
For more information, see Northwest Conifers.
