Yesterday, November 13, I put up a quiz on identifying conifer cones.  Check the previous post for the photo.

Here are the answers:

1.  Sugar pine. I collected this years ago in the foothills of Mt. Lassen, the southernmost volcano in the Cascade Range located in Northern California.  It is the largest pine and can be 200 feet tall.  It’s cone is the longest: up to 20 inches!  The name comes from its sweet pitch, which John Muir liked better than maple syrup.  John had lots of good opinions, but come on—better than maple syrup?  Sugar pine provides some of the finest knot-free lumber available, but it is declining rapidly because of a blister rust.  Sad.

2.  Ponderosa pine. I actually collected this here in West Michigan, where it is not a native tree.  It is one of the most common of Western pines.  If you’ve traveled in the West, you would have seen many of these with its distinct orangish bark with dark crevasses.  It too can grow taller than 200 feet.  It’s bark has a nice vanilla smell to it.

3.  White pine. I picked this one up in a nearby natural park.  And picking it up is not what you want to do unless you have something to wash off the pine pitch that collects on the tips of all its scales.  This collection of whitish pitch makes this cone easy to identify.  It is a relative of the sugar pine and that’s why it’s cones look similar.  This was the pine that built many of the original homes of the upper Midwest.  I’ve heard it said that enough Michigan white pine was cut into lumber in the late 1800’s that you could have floored both peninsulas of Michigan with it.  Our lumber barons, the elegant homes of whom are found all over this region, were terrible stewards of this resource.  Only after 100 years are they finally coming back—but are not yet a major source of timber in Michigan.  Only one percent of the original white pine forest is left.  In its prime, many white pines also topped 200 feet in height.

4.  Giant Sequoia. This one I gathered in the mountains above Hume Lake that rests between Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks.  Of course we know this one as the world’s largest tree.   If the shape of the cone looks familiar, it may be that you’ve chatted with a US National Park ranger in uniform.  The medallion on the ranger hatband is the sequoia cone.  And the familiar arrowhead arm patch has a sequoia tree on it.  The oldest sequoia is around 3500 years old.  Imagine the history that is included in that lifespan!

5.  Douglas fir. I picked this cone up on my way to work yesterday from a small grove not far from our RBC building.  It does okay in a few spots in the Midwest, but it is primarily a Western tree—the workhorse timber tree of the US.  It is the “cadillac of Christmas trees,” being the most common tree for that use.  Its prime trees can top 400 feet—the tallest one, cut for timber in 1902, was 415 feet tall.  The cone is easy to identify as well: it has three-forked “snake tongues” sticking out from under each scale.

6.  Coast Redwood. Surprised?  The smallest cone is from the tallest tree.  I picked this one up at a redwood seed farm on Whidbey Island in Washington—right across the road from the Pacific Rim campus of the Au Sable Institute (check out Au Sable in the links menu).  Actually, most of the tall redwoods now are around 360 feet, so a few Douglas firs can overtop them; but in numbers the redwood averages out as the tallest of our trees.  The oldest one known is about 2,200 years old.  The photo above shows how the redwood cones grow at the tips of the bough.

So how did you do with the quiz?

When you consider how small the seeds of these conifers are (the seeds found beneath the cone scales) and how big the trees are, you again have to be amazed at the wonder of God’s creation.

See you outdoors,

Dean