Pine

The pine, Pinus, is a resinous evergreen conifer of the northern world, keeping its green needles through the winter and living to great age. That constancy shaped its symbolism across Eurasia as a tree of endurance, longevity and steadfast integrity. In China the pine is foremost of the Three Friends of Winter, with the bamboo and the winter-flowering plum, a trio that stays green or blooms in the cold and stands together for the resilience and moral firmness of the cultivated person who keeps faith in hard times; the pine there is especially an emblem of long life and of the unbending upright character.

The pine family holds a genuine scientific record for tree longevity: the Great Basin bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva, of the high mountains of California, Nevada and Utah, includes individually dated trees confirmed by tree-ring counts to be well over four thousand years old, among them a tree nicknamed Methuselah, making the species, by direct physical evidence rather than legend, among the oldest known living organisms on Earth and giving the pine's old symbolism of longevity an unusually solid factual foundation. The exact location of the oldest confirmed individuals is kept undisclosed by researchers to protect the trees from vandalism, a modern precaution for organisms that were already ancient when the pyramids of Egypt were built.

In the classical world the pine belonged to the cult of Cybele and her consort Attis, who was transformed into a pine, so that a felled pine was carried in procession and mourned in the spring rites; the pine cone tipped the thyrsus, the wand of Dionysus, as an emblem of fertility and life. Its evergreen persistence through the dead season placed it, with holly and ivy, among the greenery of the northern midwinter, and it is one of the trees behind the Christmas tree. Endurance, long life, steadfast virtue, fertility and the green held up in winter all gather to the resinous evergreen, read from the plain fact that it keeps its living green when the broadleaved trees are bare.

Pine resin had a major and entirely practical economic history of its own: tapped, distilled and processed into turpentine, rosin and pine tar, it supplied the naval stores industry that waterproofed and maintained the wooden ships and rigging of the age of sail, an industry so central to shipbuilding that the term naval stores survives in English long after sailing ships themselves have largely disappeared. Rosin from pine resin is still used today to grip the strings of violin and cello bows and to keep the hands of gymnasts, weightlifters and baseball pitchers from slipping, a small, unbroken chain from the pine forest to the concert hall and the sports field.