Love your tribute to pines. I once was lucky enough to live with enough pines to experience the pollen season when everything turned yellow. The abundance of it all!
Thanks, Joyce. The pollen is crazy!! It would coat our vehicles and even our windowsills sometimes, and we'd have to vacuum it up. That stuff is being sold since there are small amounts of various testosterone analogs in it, and it's so easy to collect. :-D
Only two pines here I am particularly interested in. First is the native bunya pine (Araucaria bidwilli), whose gargantuan pine seeds are magnificent eating. The second is the Australian "pine" (Casurina spp. & Allocasurina spp.), whose needles have similar uses to white pine (good for tea & steaming ricecakes). The casurinas are also an excellent emergency water source: dig up a lateral root, chop it up into 1 1/2 ft pieces and stand them on end in a suitable container and you'll have several litres of filtered water to quench your thirst!
The bunya pine sounds great. Out west in the USA there's a pinyon (piñón) pine , Pinus edulis that produces seeds large enough to be good food, and they are sold for high dollars.
Casurinas are also a weed in some states, like Florida. I've eaten casurina seeds too but not in quantities where I'm able to discern if they're toxic or not. Their small cones open up when left to dry and you can just shake the seeds out. Some of the desert Allocasurinas are used as food this way by desert aborigines.
Thanks for honoring and acknowledging the White Pine's many gifts. I am glad you chose to try and use every bit of the tree given you chose to cut them down.
In your article you stated that "White pine typically can reach 80 feet in height, but some are much taller". Yes Much taller indeed. I was surprised to learn that here (where the soil was deep, fertile and ideal prior to colonial rape of the land) on the shore of Lake Erie pines grew up to 220 (and sometimes 240!) feet tall and up to 84 inches in diameter.
This account is backed up by traditional linguistics and place names I have come across recently when studying local indigenous historical accounts.
As I shared in a note a while back, I found out through a book that the beach near where I live was once called Wawyégmak (which means something like "place where the bald eagles nest in the great pines on the water edge") and I asked a friend with Wendat heritage about it, he said the place was known to his people as something like "yändicha’ shöndahkwa’ yänonhchia’" (which he says refers to "the dwelling of the sacred eagle where the pines touch the stars"). So multiple tribes had a name for this place that recognized the beauty of the majestic tall rooted beings and winged beings that called the place home. This compelled them to protect, preserve and honor that place as such.
Well, as you can guess, after the treaties were broken, and original inhabitants were removed from that place and the english renamed it, they called it “Colchester Beach” (this term has anthropocentric military ego based implications).
The 200 foot+ tall pines full of eagle nests are all gone now, no more eagles live in that place.
The capitalist might argue that those pines being chopped down did create a lot of “personal wealth” for a select few and there is a lot of “personal wealth and property” aggregated there now, so they see that as a "success" and "progress".
So now we live in a time when no human born on this land has ever seen a 200 foot tall plus Eastern White Pine with an eagle nest in it, and worse than that, most of them do not even know that such a thing once existed where I live now. I imagine you and I lived most of our lives in that state of generational amnesia as well.
This Generational Amnesia (aka "shifting baseline syndrome" effect) can leave people spiritually, mentally and ecologically impoverished... born into a place with more strip malls and monoculture soy fields than forest, the quality of their imagination and capacity to know and love the natural world is severely diminished, and many of them seek the superficial stimulus of glowing screens and material possessions, in a futile effort to try to fill a hole inside their hearts they do not understand, living a faded shadow of a life, born into a state of poverty of the spirit.
We can begin to change this for future generations through planting these trees and making a commitment to let them grow and enrich the soil where they live.
Here is a short video I recently recorded where I talk about the history of Eastern White Pine in Southern Ontario:
Never fear. The white pines will eventually win. They grow fast. Same for most trees. If you leave some land alone for about 30 years, the birds and bambi crap the trees in and they take over. I’m astonished at how fast the land trees up when any farm stops operation.
🤣 Georgia has jack pines, yellow pines and white pine, as far as I know. Which ones do you have?? As long as you've got true pines... you could start an industry.
I think mostly Loblolly pines. White pine is north of me in the foothills of the Appalachians. The ones I have are 20-30 feet tall and all the branches are in the top 1/3.
That's a yellow pine. Super bummer that the newest needles are out of reach. That's probably the reason that not so many people are selling those online for tea, but I guarantee you can find that species sold on Ebay. 😎 Topically the resin has good use.
The solubility of ascorbic acid is greater in water and less in ethanol. So if your interest in vitamin C and the minerals is predominant, go for pine needle tea.
Some larger or less polar molecules will be better extracted with the ethanol, and for them, the tincture makes more sense. When I’m after demulcents and polar molecules, I pour the heated water over the herbs and insulate the container so there’s a longer warm steep, but not too hot.
Love your tribute to pines. I once was lucky enough to live with enough pines to experience the pollen season when everything turned yellow. The abundance of it all!
Thanks, Joyce. The pollen is crazy!! It would coat our vehicles and even our windowsills sometimes, and we'd have to vacuum it up. That stuff is being sold since there are small amounts of various testosterone analogs in it, and it's so easy to collect. :-D
Only two pines here I am particularly interested in. First is the native bunya pine (Araucaria bidwilli), whose gargantuan pine seeds are magnificent eating. The second is the Australian "pine" (Casurina spp. & Allocasurina spp.), whose needles have similar uses to white pine (good for tea & steaming ricecakes). The casurinas are also an excellent emergency water source: dig up a lateral root, chop it up into 1 1/2 ft pieces and stand them on end in a suitable container and you'll have several litres of filtered water to quench your thirst!
cooooool! a sponge tree!
The bunya pine sounds great. Out west in the USA there's a pinyon (piñón) pine , Pinus edulis that produces seeds large enough to be good food, and they are sold for high dollars.
Casurinas are also a weed in some states, like Florida. I've eaten casurina seeds too but not in quantities where I'm able to discern if they're toxic or not. Their small cones open up when left to dry and you can just shake the seeds out. Some of the desert Allocasurinas are used as food this way by desert aborigines.
Thanks for honoring and acknowledging the White Pine's many gifts. I am glad you chose to try and use every bit of the tree given you chose to cut them down.
In your article you stated that "White pine typically can reach 80 feet in height, but some are much taller". Yes Much taller indeed. I was surprised to learn that here (where the soil was deep, fertile and ideal prior to colonial rape of the land) on the shore of Lake Erie pines grew up to 220 (and sometimes 240!) feet tall and up to 84 inches in diameter.
We have the heartbreaking evidence of these once towering super canopy trees thanks to the hubris of British industrialists bragging about the size of the beings they were harvesting in the new world in documents like this https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=aeu.ark:/13960/t3st85t97&view=1up&seq=8&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR0tFF_dGGf2ajbUmck5NqxZ56Laq9HTMn_GEUvksYj_Aj-DDK52Pi24GtI_aem_ojXwQpZtBPWi2RuZN4bQ4w
This account is backed up by traditional linguistics and place names I have come across recently when studying local indigenous historical accounts.
As I shared in a note a while back, I found out through a book that the beach near where I live was once called Wawyégmak (which means something like "place where the bald eagles nest in the great pines on the water edge") and I asked a friend with Wendat heritage about it, he said the place was known to his people as something like "yändicha’ shöndahkwa’ yänonhchia’" (which he says refers to "the dwelling of the sacred eagle where the pines touch the stars"). So multiple tribes had a name for this place that recognized the beauty of the majestic tall rooted beings and winged beings that called the place home. This compelled them to protect, preserve and honor that place as such.
Well, as you can guess, after the treaties were broken, and original inhabitants were removed from that place and the english renamed it, they called it “Colchester Beach” (this term has anthropocentric military ego based implications).
The 200 foot+ tall pines full of eagle nests are all gone now, no more eagles live in that place.
The capitalist might argue that those pines being chopped down did create a lot of “personal wealth” for a select few and there is a lot of “personal wealth and property” aggregated there now, so they see that as a "success" and "progress".
So now we live in a time when no human born on this land has ever seen a 200 foot tall plus Eastern White Pine with an eagle nest in it, and worse than that, most of them do not even know that such a thing once existed where I live now. I imagine you and I lived most of our lives in that state of generational amnesia as well.
This Generational Amnesia (aka "shifting baseline syndrome" effect) can leave people spiritually, mentally and ecologically impoverished... born into a place with more strip malls and monoculture soy fields than forest, the quality of their imagination and capacity to know and love the natural world is severely diminished, and many of them seek the superficial stimulus of glowing screens and material possessions, in a futile effort to try to fill a hole inside their hearts they do not understand, living a faded shadow of a life, born into a state of poverty of the spirit.
We can begin to change this for future generations through planting these trees and making a commitment to let them grow and enrich the soil where they live.
Here is a short video I recently recorded where I talk about the history of Eastern White Pine in Southern Ontario:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHGIL8G37mE
Never fear. The white pines will eventually win. They grow fast. Same for most trees. If you leave some land alone for about 30 years, the birds and bambi crap the trees in and they take over. I’m astonished at how fast the land trees up when any farm stops operation.
Thanks for restacking.
Made the tea in a French press and sweetened with local honey. Very tasty!
Good winter drink, yaa. 👍
What am I doing with my Georgia pines? Mostly cursing the mess!! However, I’m open to learning alternatives.
🤣 Georgia has jack pines, yellow pines and white pine, as far as I know. Which ones do you have?? As long as you've got true pines... you could start an industry.
I think mostly Loblolly pines. White pine is north of me in the foothills of the Appalachians. The ones I have are 20-30 feet tall and all the branches are in the top 1/3.
That's a yellow pine. Super bummer that the newest needles are out of reach. That's probably the reason that not so many people are selling those online for tea, but I guarantee you can find that species sold on Ebay. 😎 Topically the resin has good use.
found a group of baby loblollies on my run today :)
There will be no speed records anymore. Being outside gets to be a whole new thing when you study what's growing.
I'm one slow kid because of touring the weeds.
no records for me, either. But I always pause my app when I stop to explore.
Will making a tincture with pine destroy the Vitamin C ? I think I read that RoseHips shouldn't be tinctured for that reason.
The solubility of ascorbic acid is greater in water and less in ethanol. So if your interest in vitamin C and the minerals is predominant, go for pine needle tea.
Some larger or less polar molecules will be better extracted with the ethanol, and for them, the tincture makes more sense. When I’m after demulcents and polar molecules, I pour the heated water over the herbs and insulate the container so there’s a longer warm steep, but not too hot.