Common Names

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

Taxonomic notes

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).

Range

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).

Big Tree

Diameter 78 cm, height 29 m, crown spread 14 m, located in Stokes County, NC (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).

Oldest

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.

Dendrochronology

Ethnobotany

Used for pulpwood and firewood (Kral 1993).

Observations

Remarks

Citations

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.

See Also

FEIS database.