Canary Island Pine

I have nine trees on my property that were planted in 1982. They grow conically and then start to spread with age becoming quite wide. ...Read More Positive, they have lovely dark green color, and provide wonderful shade. In fact, I highly recommend planting them about 6 to ten feet from the west and south side of your lawn. The shade will considerably reduce the amount of water your lawn requires and the needles are easily picked up by a mower with a bag. Negative, they shed needles in the summer and are a lot of work to clean up after once they get very big. The needles are in triplets that are fine if the tree has no shrubs under them. But if they land on shrubs they do not fall to the ground but the Y gets stuck and they look like many brown narrow ice cycles that are hard to remove. These also get caught in lower branches of the trees so there is dead clumps in the trees near the lower parts. These then blow out of the trees in winter. So windy days equates to clean up tasks. They also emit lots of pollen and some sap when large. The pollen is bad enough that you need to wash windshields after two days. So at my house, no one wants to park under them, and I would also not recommend placing them over a patio as they would leave sticky furniture and patio decks. The pollen washes off with soapy water easily but the sap is a pain to clean up. At about year 22 the trees did lift sidewalks at two locations about 1.5 inches. These were in locations with a tree about 7 feet from the sidewalk. In the right place, I would certainly plant them again. But not over drives and patios, nor over bushes.

Epicormic sprouting is probably an adaptation to fire ecology. I have seen CIP, as I abbreviate it, completely burned and then resprout.

Native to the Canary Islands, this pine is probably THE most planted conifer in southern California... it is everywhere you look. Tall, ...Read Morenarrow, whispy tree that has a bit of a tropical look, with markedly drooping needles (only the new spring growth sticks up). It also has a peculiar habit of producing tiny branches and tufts of needles all along the trunk (called epicormic growth)- only pine tree I know that does that normally (can be an abnormal stress occurence in many other trees). Way overplanted here in So Cal- most should be replaced with palms. Oh well.