Encyclopedia of Stanford Trees, Shrubs, and Vines
It is extensively used on campus, for example behind the church. An impressive older specimen (12 feet in girth) stands on Galvez Street outside the Burnham Pavilion, and another farther along Galvez Street in the lawn behind the Arrillaga Alumni Center. There is one at 762 Dolores Street. There are six old ones that used to shelter Roos Brothers men’s store in the 1950s between the Bookstore and 505 Lasuen Mall (which used to be the Career Development Center, and before that was the Bookstore and also accommodated a cobbler once upon a time). Three big specimens northwest of Green Earth Sciences that date back to expansion of the High Energy Physics Lab in the 1960s – and that already bear delicious nuts – were supplemented by a further seven when Green Earth Sciences was built.
Twenty large specimens planted in the Stone Pine Plaza at the Science and Engineering Quad in 1999 will form a splendid canopy and their first crop of pine nuts, when it comes, will be welcomed by squirrels and other rodents (the nuts are more or less inaccessible to birds) [see Additions/Revisions below]. Many pine seeds have significant wings that are clearly helpful in dispersing the seeds as they fall from the tree tops on windy days. By contrast, the heavy pine nut doffs its wing. This indicates that wind no longer plays a role in seed dispersal. Does this mean that the stone pine depends on running water to move the heavy seeds or does it mean that the collecting hand of woman superseded the breeze? [see Additions/Revisions below]
Pinus monophylla, which grows from Eastern California into the Great Basin, and Pinus edulis, which grows in a few desert ranges in Southeastern California, yield a bountiful crop of nutritious kernels that provided a staple for Native Americans, and wild nuts are still collected today. The P. pinea nuts are known as pinóli, pignóli (which also means pernickety), or sometimes pinóchi, in Italy, where they are much used in pastries and vegetarian dishes. Evidently Pinocchio was a pine nut. The non-Italian word Pignolia is mentioned as a trade name in Webster's Dictionary of 1929 and currently attaches to pine kernels imported from Pakistan and China.
Why should this pine be broad and rounded like a stone, while other pines are narrow and taper upwards to an apex? As a rule, flowering trees spread their crowns, while conifers tend to rise above them as conical spires; we may accept this distinction as one of the many differences, in leaves, fruit, and wood for instance. But why should a pine be not like other pines? Surely the stone pine evolved from ancestors that received sunlight falling from high in the sky, while other pines disposed their foliage on tall masts suited to collecting light from a sun that did not rise very much above the horizon.
A simple key to campus pines.
Other campus pines: Pinus brutia ssp. eldarica | Pinus bungeana | Pinus canariensis | Pinus contorta | Pinus coulteri | Pinus densiflora | Pinus edulis | Pinus halepensis | Pinus jeffreyi | Pinus maximartinezii | Pinus mugo | Pinus muricata | Pinus nigra | Pinus patula | Pinus pinea | Pinus ponderosa | Pinus radiata | Pinus roxburghii | Pinus sabiniana | Pinus sylvestris | Pinus thunbergiana | Pinus torreyana | Pinus wallichiana
Illustrations (links open new windows): habit |Additions/Revisions: Michael Geordie comments (in red): "An attractive tree of very characteristic round-topped shape without an apical leader which, one might say, looks like a stone. More likely, the very hard-shelled nut accounts for the English name" -- it does have an apical leader when young, just that the branches are nearly as long; and the English name does derive from the stone-like seeds (c.f. 'stone fruit' for cherries, plums, etc). "its natural distribution the tree hugs the entire north Mediterranean coast from Lebanon to Portugal" -- probably native only on the Iberian Peninsula, only cultivated further east (Mirov, The Genus Pinus, 1967). "(the nuts are more or less inaccessible to birds) ... Does this mean that the stone pine depends on running water to move the heavy seeds or does it mean that the collecting hand of woman superseded the breeze?" -- the seeds are bird-dispersed (Lanner, The Piñon Pine, 1981); at Stanford, the most likely disperser would be Western Scrub Jay.
Name derivation, genus | species The Latin name | Latin for pine nutRelated material: Canopy Trees for Palo Alto Tree Library | Gymnosperm Database
name index | Common name index | Family