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The iconic tree might not be impressive in stature, but these short kings are nothing if not resilient.
Sure, the jack pine doesn’t win any “prettiest evergreen” awards — it’s all scruffyness and twisted limbs. But the tree does get a prize for being the most widely distributed pine in Canada, growing naturally everywhere except B.C., Newfoundland, and P.E.I. Here are five other facts you may not have heard about Pinus banksiana, one of our scrappiest conifers.
Grow On
Jack pines can tolerate many site conditions that other, taller pines can’t, including dry, sandy, or rocky soil, and even permafrost. Open areas and windswept shorelines are no problem for a jack pine; it has flexible limbs that can bend without breaking. A jack’s only real enemy is shade. At an average mature height of 12 to 18 m, it can’t flourish under a canopy of taller trees. Despite its short stature, it grows faster than almost any other evergreen: five to 10 metres in 20 years. (That doesn’t sound especially speedy, but it’s lightning-quick if you’re a tree.) Still, jack pines live fast and die young. Only about a quarter of stands ever reach maturity—roughly 60 years—and less than five per cent last for a century.
Some Like It Real Hot
Unlike other trees, jack pines don’t release seeds at regular intervals. They need extreme heat — the kind produced by a forest fire — to reproduce. Although they start growing cones in clusters of twos and threes when they’re about five years old, the cones usually remain on the trees, sealed closed with a coating of resin. They remain closed for years until fire melts the resin and the cones open. The open cones then drop seeds to the ground where they can germinate. The fire, having burned much of the surrounding vegetation in the forest, has created the unshaded growing conditions that the tree prefers. Plus, minerals — released from the other burnt vegetation — have seeped into the soil, which helps to feed the jack pine seedlings as they grow. The parent jack pine might eventually die because of the fire, but only after having released up to a decade’s worth of seeds into a site where few other competing trees can grow. Jackpot!
Fuel for the Forest Friends
Like any other tree, jack pines do their part to feed their wildlife neighbours. After a fire, if the cones don’t get hot enough to fall off, they’ll eventually soften enough to make them edible to animals — red squirrels, for example — that clip them from branches. Cones that end up on the ground turn into food for birds, voles, and chipmunks; and porcupines and hares are fans of the tree’s grey bark (it’s not as gummy as the bark of spruce or balsam). In the winter, the tree’s needles feed spruce grouse, and its shoots and seedlings are chow for browsers such as moose and deer.
A Famous Fellow
In the botany and forestry world, jack pine is known for its ability to rise from the ashes. But the evergreen’s biggest claim to fame to the average Canadian? It’s the subject of one of artist Tom Thomson’s most famous works, The Jack Pine (1916-1917), allegedly painted at Grand Lake in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. According to the National Gallery of Canada, which bought the oil painting in 1918, it’s “widely recognized as a masterpiece of Canadian art.”
You Don’t Know Jack
In case there’s any doubt, this tree — also called the scrub pine or the grey pine — wasn’t named after someone named Jack. But it does owe its latin name to a human: Joseph Banks, a British explorer and botanist who was the first to document the species while visiting Canada. But Banks didn’t name the tree after himself … or at all. (That’s considered self-centred in the botany world. And probably everywhere.) It was another plant expert, Aylmer Bourke Lambert, who first called the tree Pinus banksiana in his book, A Description of the Genus Pinus, when it was published in the early 1800s. We hope you wrote Aylmer a thank you note, Joseph!
