Book review: “Pine” by Laura Mason

Here’s a thought: Somewhere in the American Southwest — the exact location is a highly guarded secret — is a Great Basin bristlecone that botanists and foresters estimate to be 4,500 years old.

It is, writes Laura Mason in Pine, the oldest living plant on earth, and it’s called Methuselah.

This is a tree which was more than 2,000 years old when Jesus and Julius Caesar walked the earth, more than 1,700 years old when Rome was founded around 753 BC, and more than 1,300 years old when Rameses the Great ruled ancient Egypt.

Even so, there have been older trees among “the spectacularly long-lived bristlecone pines of the Colorado Great Basin,” notes Mason.

“These, the oldest living individual plants on Earth, grow in a climate that stresses the tree to its limits, slowing growth and leaving the living branches attached by a slender strip of bark to the roots while the rest of the tree dies.

“Dr. Edmund Schulman studied them in the 1950s; when the oldest living tree was accidentally cut down in 1964, it was discovered to have 4,862 rings.”

Here’s another thought: If you can think of a human activity, now and back into antiquity, pinewood has probably been involved.  For instance, ancient Greek carpenters used pine to make homes, and the surviving business accounts of the Parthenon include the purchase of pinewood.  Mason adds:

“One very early use of pinewood was discovered unexpectedly.  In 1966, archeologists excavating the site destined to be a car park for Stonehenge found a row of three pits that had evidently held large posts.

Traces of wood from them proved to be pine, which was radiocarbon-dated to around 8,500-7650 BC.”

 

Trees, plants and flowers

Pine, published by the London-based Reaktion Books and distributed by University of Chicago Press, is a delightfully accessible and erudite look on seemingly all aspects of the simple pine tree, written with verve by Mason.

Not that the pine tree is all that simple.  There are, depending on how you look at them and which expert is doing the looking, around 100 to 110 species of pine (genus Pinus, family Pinaceae).

“They are evergreen conifers, bearing seeds in woody cones and needle-like leaves in bundles.  As a group they are not fussy about soils.  Individual species have their foibles, but the genus provides examples that grow in alkaline soils such as dolomitic limestone, on sand dunes, in serpentine soils poor in nutrients and high in toxic materials, and in boggy areas.”

Pine is one of more than 30 books in Reaktion’s Botanical series, integrating horticultural and botanical writing with the cultural and social impact of trees, plants and flowers. The books were originally published in hardcover, starting in the mid-2010s, and are now being issued in paperback.

They include books on trees, such as Oak, Willow, Ash and Birch, and on flowers, such as Tulip, Orchid and Rose. But also subjects further afield, such as House Plants by Michael Maunder and Weeds by Nina Edwards, which is forthcoming as a paperback in December through University of Chicago Press.

 

“Wind and fire and light”

Mason, a noted British food historian, died of cancer in 2021, eight years after Pine was published in hardcover. Among the book’s seven chapters is one about the use of the pine tree for food, mostly how pine nuts have been integrated into recipes for thousands of years.

Nonetheless, she was stretching beyond her area of expertise in doing the book, and the result is a high testament to the thoroughness of her research, the clarity of her thinking and the grace of her writing.  For instance, she opens the book with a poetic portrayal of the pine in the world:

“Pines are trees of wind and fire and light.  Wind carries their pollen from one tree to another, disperses the seeds of many and fans the fires that are often their nemesis.

“Fire feeds on the resin-saturated wood of mature and dead pines and fertilizes the ground for their seeds to germinate.  For some species it is an essential part of their natural history, the heat opening their cones and releasing seeds; and in fire-cleared ground pine seedlings receive plenty of light.”

 

Naming individual pines

Pine tells a complex story in clear and direct prose.  Different sorts of pines vary in terms of size, shape, geography and landscape, and humans have found a universe of uses for the tree’s wood and everything else about it.  While Mason’s book is rooted in the scientific knowledge and questions about the pine as a plant, it is also filled with fascinating insights into how the pine is woven into human life — and death.

Consider, for example, that, at times in American history, a coffin was known as a “pine overcoat.”

The pine forests that colonists found in North America were vast tracts of a natural resource that was harvested as if it was endless.  Indeed, Mason points out that, during the 1800s, an estimated 25 to 30 percent of each harvested tree was wasted.

Pines have long been important in the cultures of China, Japan and Korea, and Mason writes, “Korean and Japanese culture shared the tradition of venerating and naming individual pines.”  She adds:

“Combined with bamboo and plum blossoms, pine foliage is one of the ‘three friends of winter,’ a trio used in compositions found as far back as the ninth century in both Chinese and Japanese art.”

In North America, Mason writes, Apache mothers would put the cradleboards of their children in the east side of a young pinyon and say, “Here is my baby carrier.  I give this to you, still young and growing. I want my child to grow up as you do.”

Today, contemporary Western attitudes are reflecting the Far Eastern veneration for ancient trees to the point that there is a growing sense that it’s a sin to cut down one of the long-lived bristlecones.

 

“Waving in a storm”

Mason concludes her book with a chapter on the sound of the wind through the branches of the pines.  In it, she quotes Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir about “God’s big show” in the Yosemite Valley:

“I wish you could see our pines in full bloom of soft snow or waving in a storm.  They know little of the character of a pine tree who see it only when swaying drowsily in a summer breeze or when balanced motionless and fast asleep in hushed sunshine.”

Pines are so ubiquitous in the human experience that it’s possible to take them for granted.  Not after reading Laura Mason’s Pine.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.31.24

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 10.24.2024.