Belgian coal miners trusted Scots pine because it cracked loudly before failing
In the coal mining regions of Flanders, tunnels were propped with Scots pine for a practical reason: the timber made a cracking noise when it needed replacing. The same species is Scotland's national tree, the only pine native to northern Europe, and some specimens in Finnish Lapland have lived more than 760 years.
Pinus sylvestris is easy to spot by its short blue-green needles, carried in pairs, and its orange-red upper bark, which turns grey-brown and scaly lower down with age. Mature trees usually reach about 35 metres, with a long bare trunk topped by a rounded crown; the tallest on record, in Estonia, stands 46.6 metres. Its range runs from Western Europe to Eastern Siberia and well inside the Arctic Circle, though in the south it becomes a mountain tree growing between 1,200 and 2,600 metres. It thrives on poor sandy soils, rock and bog, and is outcompeted on richer ground by spruce and broadleaves.
The species is old: a fossil seed cone of the lineage dates to roughly 2.6 million years ago. After the last Ice Age it spread back into Britain, reaching southern England by 9,000 years ago and Scotland between 8,000 and 8,500 years ago. Warming later wiped it out across nearly all of the two islands some 5,500 years back, Scotland aside, and in England and Wales it died out about 300 to 400 years ago through overuse and grazing, before being reintroduced.
Scotland kept its native pines, which formed the backbone of the Caledonian Forest. Logging, fire, grazing by sheep and deer, and even clearances meant to drive out wolves reduced it to around 17,000 hectares, just over 1 percent of an estimated original 1,500,000. Surviving remnants include Abernethy, Glen Affric, Rothiemurchus and the Black Wood of Rannoch, and restoration work has begun.
Economically the tree has been versatile. Its timber, once sold as red or yellow deal after an old unit of wood measurement, goes into construction and pulp on plantation cycles of 50 to 120 years. Scandinavians tapped it for tar, rosin and turpentine, and its fibres make a soft textile called vegetable flannel. Brought to North America around 1600, it ranked among America's favourite festive trees for three decades up to the 1980s, starting in the 1950s, and it is now considered invasive in places such as Ontario and Michigan.
Source: Pinus sylvestris
