Damaged White Pine

No guts, no glory, fire up that saw!! JK

A minor point, the pileated woodpecker doesnt do the damage, there was rot in the tree and insects so the woodpecker just opened up access to already damaged wood.

There are some other smaller woodpeckers that intentionally damage a tree by pecking rows of holes in the bark to attract insectsbut pilleateds are not one of them.

White pInes just dont make good landscape trees, they are far better in the woods far away from houses.

thewoodlands said:

I'll let someone else have the glory go on this one, I don't have cable strong enough to hold it if it went towards the house.

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I was totally kidding, I wouldn't touch that size tree close to the house if you paid me.

peakbagger said:

. . .

White pInes just dont make good landscape trees, they are far better in the woods far away from houses.

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Agree 100% . . . if I was ever to build a home the first thing I would do is clear all of the nearby eastern white pine from wherever the house is located. The pine cones and needle drop is messy . . . if you park a car underneath it will inevitably have sap drops on it at some point . . . it's hard to grow grass underneath . . . they often do not grow in a very "pretty" shape . . . it seems to be much more susceptible to winds causing branch or top breakage (or on my lot they just fall over due to the ledge near the surface) . . . and my wife hates them because they tend to block a lot of the sunlight in the winter.

All in all . . . not one one of my favorite "yard" trees.

While growing up my parents bought a 100' by 100' lot in a development. It was devoid of landscaping and privacy with the neighbors. My parents really stretched to buy the place so they dug up wild trees to transplant for landscaping. They put in row of pines. along the property line. They grew quick and did provide privacy early on but as they grew despite aggressive pruning they looked lousy. They sold the house to new owner that looked in subsequent years to not be into home maintenance at all. About 10 years later I drove by and the white pines had taken off and did what pines like to do in good soils, they took off and started shooting up, dumping their lower branches along the way. About 20 years later they were quite tall and gangly. Access the the yard was slim to non so I expect getting them dropped would be a major project. The soils wasnt deep and I expect at some point the trees flipped over. I checked on Google Earth and close to 40 years later they are gone.

My neighborhood has sporadic white pines, one of them sprung up on my lot, its well away from the house and I have been letting it grow. There is white pine weevil in the area (like many places) so pines dont grow as tall as fast. The weevil tends to eventually leave the larger trees alone and if they are in good soils once the weevil leaves them alone they really start getting tall. I expect I will drop mine before it become difficult.

Have fun cleaning that thing up. I just dropped a white pine with 40" trunk. I cannot get over the amount of branches I'm cleaning up. I've got a brush pile that's 20' round and 8' high and I'm still working on it!

Growing up our neighbor had a bunch of huge white pines in a very large yard away from his house. For years we took the limbs that fell during the winter, cut them up early spring and burned them the following winter. Though his house was safe he stored his very large boat nearby and finally had them all taken down.

peakbagger said:

There is white pine weevil in the area (like many places) so pines dont grow as tall as fast. The weevil tends to eventually leave the larger trees alone and if they are in good soils once the weevil leaves them alone they really start getting tall. I expect I will drop mine before it become difficult.

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There was an interesting story a few years back on the NHPR radio program "Something Wild." In that program, the hosts and experts mentioned why the White Pines which are growing along a fencerow or in a yard are so gangly. As it turns out, the weevil likes the growing buds of these trees because the buds are in a slightly warmer location compared to the buds of a forest grown tree. As the weevil destroys the growing tips, the tree responds by growing more dominant leaders higher up the trunk, making for a gangly shape. A keen eye can see this when walking a forest - the massive and straight White Pines are forest grown, the gangly ones are one the edge of a forest or even on the edge of a formerly cleared spot which has now grown in. Fascinating stuff.

White pine is good for building log cabins and that is what I built my cabin with. Quite good.
Also makes good kindling.

My fiancee has a rental house built in 1969. Very nice 3 br brick house in a nice neighborhood, Asheville NC.
When the neighborhood was young, some genius planted 6 white pines along the property line.
And, I'm sure, that about 1979, those trees were pretty, looked like big Christmas trees, and provided a nice privacy wall.

But, after 50 years, those trees are 90 feet tall! No kind of privacy fence, there are no branches for the first 30 feet.
As I have told the fiancee, some day those trees are coming down and somebody will get their roof caved in.

But, it seemed like a good idea in 1969, what could go wrong?
I have tried to get the fiancee and the neighbor to cut these trees, would be a lot cheaper than dealing with a caved in roof.
The gals prefer to put blindfolds on and hope the problem goes away.

What those damn white pines and plant Leland Cypress.