National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Pine Cone and Tassel

The Pine Cone and Tassel (Pinus strobus L.)


When the school children of Maine elected the pine cone and tassel as the floral standard bearer for their State, they not only followed the precedent that made theirs the “Pine Tree State,” but they honored the first-born of the flowering plants; for science tells us that in the long process of evolution, when some of the members of the fern family began to strive for higher things, their first success on the road to perfection was to become cone-bearers. And so today the cone-bearers remain the great middle class in the flower world between the plebeian fern on the one hand and the patrician rose and the noble lily on the other.

How wonderful and how charming is the story of the pine's household economy! It is so equipped that it can make its home down in the lands of tropic warmth or up in the regions of polar snow. The last tree one meets, almost, on a climb to the high summits of snow-capped mountains is the pine. The gales may blow so hard and so persistently that not a limb is able to grow on the windward side; but, twisted and misshapen, the pine still lives on.

Though the winds seem harsh to the pine, they are none the less its good friends. It employs them as the messengers in the spreading of its pollen. The pistils and stamens grow in separate flowers, and the breezes transport the pollen from tassel to cone and from tree to tree. Each grain is provided with two tiny bladders which give it buoyancy and enable it to take a balloon ride. In the region where the winds blow the hardest they serve the conifers best, for there insects are scarce and the trees would be exterminated if they had to depend on such pollen-bearers. This is only another evidence of the natural ability of the pine to adjust itself to its surroundings. The tree that could go on and on through numberless generations evolving a conifer out of a fern naturally would have adaptability enough to meet the wind both as foe and friend.

As a messenger the wind is wasteful, and so the pines, to perpetuate their species on earth, must produce vast quantities of pollen.

In the flowering season of the pines the air is filled with tiny grains of yellow dust, the ponds are covered with a golden scum, and one sees evidences of pine pollen everywhere. This pollen is shed from small tassels which occur at the base of the green shoots that form the current year's growth. Upon the under side of each scale of every cone is a tiny bag of jelly. When a pollen grain flies that way and gets stuck in this little bed of jelly, the scale closes up so as to be water—and even air—tight. Some of the pine species even varnish the openings so as to make them safe. Within this cozy chamber the miracle of life is consummated, and ere long there is a small seed, with its wing attached, mature and awaiting the day when the friendly wind will carry it to where it can plant itself and grow up into a big tree.

When the cone dies, the seeds it harbors live on. During the winter months the squirrels improve every fair day to gather pine seeds for their present needs and their future wants. If you have ever watched a squirrel open up a pine cone, you have wondered how he learned so well the art of getting the seeds out easily. He handles the cone as adeptly as a trained athlete might handle a weight. He takes it in his fore feet, hurls it bottom upward, as if he were a professional juggler, and then begins to gnaw at the base of the lowest row of cells. Presently an opening reveals a seed or two. Thus he goes around and around the cone, taking each scale in its order, and before you could do it by hand he has unlocked every one of them.

The cones the squirrels do not get hang on as if they were the “pimmerly plums” of Uncle Remus' story. But when the first faint evidences appear that the balmy warmth of spring is to succeed the icy breath of winter, there comes a popping and a cracking in the pine forest, and the seasoned woodsman knows that it is the cones firing salutes of welcome to the approaching spring. As the months pass on, one by one the cones dry out, the bended bows of their many scales are released as the drying-out process pulls the hair-trigger that holds them, and ten thousand thousand winged seeds fly out into the world with the ambition to transform themselves into trees.

It is interesting to gather a number of different species of pine cones before they have begun to open and watch them do so. Some of them jump around like things possessed as the scales on which they rest open up; others roll this way and turn that. When the last scale is open and the last seed is out, the cone may be three times as large as it was formerly and a hundred or more seeds have been set free. Alas, how few of these ever become trees. We are told, for instance, that a big tree in California produces from 100 to 200 seeds to a cone and as many as 1,000,000 cones to the tree—that is, 100,000,000 seeds in a single season.

There are 42 native species of pines in the United States. They make the woods of Maine and other northern States largely evergreen. Countless generations of warring with the elements led them to adopt the needle instead of the leaf, for needles do not oppose the free passage of the wind or afford snow a platform which could crush them. Hence it is that the pines “bind the tottering edge of cleft and chasm and fringe with sudden tints of unhoped-for spring the Arctic edges of retreating desolation.”

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 495–496. (Illustration from page 510.)