Description
Pinus pinaster is a medium-size tree, reaching 20–35 m tall and with a trunk diameter of up to 1.2 m, exceptionally 1.8 m.
The bark is orange-red, thick and deeply fissured at the base of the trunk, somewhat thinner in the upper crown.
The leaves ('needles') are in pairs, very stout (2 mm broad), up to 25 cm long, and bluish-green to distinctly yellowish-green. The Maritime Pine features the longest and most robust needles of all European pine species.
The cones are conic, 10–20 cm long and 4–6 cm broad at the base when closed, green at first, ripening glossy red-brown when 24 months old. They open slowly over the next few years, or after being heated by a forest fire, to release the seeds, opening to 8–12 cm broad.
The seeds are 8–10 mm long, with a 20–25 mm wing, and are wind-dispersed.
Maritime Pine is closely related to Turkish Pine, Canary Island Pine and Aleppo Pine, which all share many features with it. It is a relatively non-variable species, with constant morphology over the entire range.
Read more about this topic: Maritime Pine
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)