four
Pine for Timber and Torches
Rayon is made from pinewood. So are paper and cardboard, chipboard, match wood, dowelling, planking, inexpensive furniture of all descriptions and kitchen fittings. Pine joists hold up floors, pine poles carry telephone wires and pine pallets aid in the handling of goods in warehouses. The wood is used to make boxes and small domestic objects of all kinds. For humans pinewood has meant warmth, light and charcoal. Twigs, leaves, bark and roots have all found applications. Every part of the tree has had a use at some point in one or another culture around the world. The subject is both vast and only patchily charted by writers.
Pine is softwood, a term indicating that it is (mostly) relatively easy to work when compared with hardwoods produced by deciduous trees. The pitch content also acts as a natural preservative, making pinewood resistant to decay. Within the genus Pinus, species in subgenus Strobus are sometimes colloquially called ‘soft pines’, and those in subgenus Pinus ‘hard pines’ because of relative differences in their wood – although as with all things to do with pine trees, there are exceptions.
In everyday use the word ‘pine’ is a generalized term for conifer wood, one that subsumes wood from a multiplicity of species. In 1866, J. Lindley and T. Moore said the word applied ‘especially to that of Pinus strobus’, and that ‘Baltic, Riga, Norway, Red, or Memel Pine is the timber of Pinus sylvestris as grown in the north of Europe’.1 The latter was also known as red deal or Christiania deal because it was shipped from the Baltic port of Christiania, now known as Oslo. ‘Red wood’ is still the British timber trade name for Scots pine, but white ‘Baltic pine’ is a trade name for Norway spruce (Picea abies), also known as white wood.2 ‘Deal’ is a word of Germanic origin derived from timbertrade vocabulary (as is ‘wainscot’) to describe sawn timber. Deal related to size, not species, indicating pieces at least 12 ft long, 7 in. wide, and not more than 3 in. thick (approx. 3,660 × 180 × 80 mm). Special end uses, such as masts for ships, required certain attributes, but other wise pine was pine, a commodity traded from wherever it could be easily extracted.
Industrial pine: another lorry load of logs delivered to a processing plant.
Numerous trade synonyms evolved for the best-known species of North American and Western European pine. A. B. Lyons, who published a Dictionary of Plant Names in 1900, listed, for instance, for longleaf pine:
Georgia pine, southern or swamp pine, broom pine, Florida or Virgina pine, Georgia or Texas yellow pine, southern or yellow pitch pine, southern hard pine, long-straw pine, turpentine pine, yellow pine, white rosin tree.3
Advertisement for Dodge & Co, manufacturers of lumber, late 19th century. The North American timber trade ruthlessly exploited vast areas of forest from the early 19th century onwards, using first water and then steam power to aid this.
Even those in the timber trade despaired of these myriad names. In 1909, the periodical American Lumberman and Building Products Merchandiser lamented the confusion over the terms ‘Western pine’ and ‘Western white pine’. Western pine, or Western yellow pine, was Pinus ponderosa, but could also be found under the names California white pine, Western white pine, Navajo white pine, Western pine, Panhandle pine, Idaho white pine or even ‘famous looking glass pine’ in one edition of the journal alone.4
Trade names of pine are no easier in the twenty-first century. spf is an acronym used in the USA, applied to sawn wood sold for general carpentry and utility purposes, and stands for ‘Spruce-Pine-Fir’. The distinction between the trees, so carefully worked out by botanists, is concealed again by the demands of the timber industry. From a practical point of view, perhaps identification is not important. From the earliest times, people must have used whatever was to hand, with only woodworkers recognizing special qualities according to species and origin.
Those with a botanical interest seem to have been the people who most commented in writing on the qualities of wood from different species and regions. In Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum, arboriculturist John Claudius Loudon remarked how Scots pine timber from different locations varied:
in low situations, where it is a lofty timber tree, the wood on some light, sandy soils is white, almost without resin, and of little duration; while on other soils, of a colder and more substantial nature, it is red, heavy, and of great durability.5
By contrast, his description of wood from Swiss stone pine speaks of its generally small size, sweet perfume and soft, fine-grained nature: ‘in joinery it is of great value, as it is remarkably easy to be worked . . . The wood is much used for wainscoting, having not only an agreeable light brown appearance, but retaining its odour.’ It carved easily, and the Swiss shepherds ‘occupy their leisure hours in carving out of it numerous small curious little figures of men and animals, which they sell in the towns and which have found their way all over Europe.’6 It was also used for wood turning.
The utility of the pine tree was frequently praised. In the seventeenth century, John Evelyn said it could be used for carving ‘for capitals, festoons, nay statues’. He listed numerous other uses: boxes, barrels, shingles for houses and hoops for wine vessels; it was good for scaffolding and had a natural spring useful for coach-builders. Pines also provides kernels and ‘for tooth-pickers even the very leaves are commended’. He also said that it was good ‘for piles to superstruct in boggy grounds, most of Venice and Amsterdam is built on them [pine piles]’.7 Chips or shavings from deal boards kindled fires. Pine trunks were bored out to provide water pipes for eighteenth-century London, the timber coming from northern Scotland.8
An agricultural handbook published in China in the early twentieth century said of the pine tree:
Its bole can be sawn into planks to make boats or carts . . . Branches and needles can be used for fuel . . . its bark and seeds can be used for medicine . . . Branches which are not suitable for firewood but which contain resin can be used as torches, and small trees can be put in a kiln to extract the smoke and to make charcoal. Branches which give exceptionally clean and delicate soot can be used to make ink.9
In 1914, George Russell Shaw observed of the Himalayan species chir pine that
The wood is used for construction and for the manufacture of charcoal, the thick soft bark is valuable for tanning, the resin is abundant and of commercial importance, and the nuts are gathered for food.10
Early 20th-century Norwegian tine, a storage box, made from pine.
Such statements could be echoed again and again around the world in pre-industrial societies. A word which is not often mentioned is one that springs most easily to mind in combination with pine in Europe and North America: furniture.
A few examples from history illustrate the uses of pinewood over a broad sweep of time. One very early use of pinewood was discovered unexpectedly. In 1966, archaeologists excavating the site destined to become the main 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 8500–7650 BC (a fourth hole, slightly off the alignment, was found later). The wood dated from a time when southern Britain was covered with pine trees, as the climate warmed and vegetation spread in the wake of retreating glaciers. No one will ever be able to say if it was chosen for being pine, or simply because it came from large trees, and the purpose of the posts remains mysterious, though archaeologists think they probably formed part of a ceremonial or religious shrine.11
From early times, pinewood was used for construction. In about 800 BC, a royal tomb was built in the Phrygian capital of Gordum, southwest of Ankara in Turkey. Twentieth-century archaeologists found it to be constructed of various woods, including walls and cross-beams made from pine, a pattern generally repeated in building remains found in the city. The wood was Scots pine and Austrian pine, suggesting that substantial pine forests once grew in an area now largely devoid of trees.12
In classical times, Theophrastus said that pine was used for carpentry in houses, and purchases of pinewood are recorded in the accounts for the Parthenon.13 In Rome, one factor that was important in the choice of pinewood was the height of the trees used, as both masts and an apparent Roman preference for single-span roofs demanded long timbers. Seneca and Juvenal both commented on timber carts carrying long fir and pine logs, nodding dangerously, and making the streets of Rome shake.14
The medieval people of Norway have left a legacy of wooden-built stave churches, mostly made from pine. These buildings, which are 500–700 years old, are made of timbers placed vertically in the ground, in the way in which a palisade is constructed, rather than by the more usual method of placing one plank or log on top of another. Many are elaborate, consisting of several stories placed one on top of another, with the outline broken by steeply pitched roofs and decorated with elaborate carving. They are pine buildings preserved with pine tar: centuries of treating the wood with pitch have given the exteriors of these remarkable buildings a dark red or almost black colour.
John Evelyn reported that the inhabitants of the Canary Islands ‘near Tenariff . . . do usually build their houses with the timber of the pitch-trees’, but that this was dangerous because of the risk of fire; ‘Whenever a house is attacqu’d they make all imaginable hast out of the conflagration and almost despair of extinguishing it.’15 Fire in wooden buildings, especially those of pine, must have been a constant hazard.
In 1856, Andrew Jackson Downing, the author of A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America remarked:
In the United States, full four-fifths of all the houses built are constructed of the White and Yellow Pine, chiefly of the former. Soft, easily worked, light and fine in texture, it is almost universally employed in carpentry, and for all the purposes of civil architecture.16
If the majority of settlers from Europe lived in log cabins or clapboard houses built of pinewood, this was not just because it was easy to use and a good building material, but also because it was close to hand.
Practices recorded among native North Americans illustrate the use of pine for shelter in mobile tribal societies. The tallness and relative lightness of lodgepole pines contributed to their common name:
It was due to these . . . that they were named Lodgepole Pines by Lewis and Clark. Indians of the Great Plains journeyed to the Rocky Mountains to obtain such slender poles for their lodges or tepees.17
Another well-recorded use was for tree bark, including that of gray pine and western yellow pine. It was used in conical dwellings built of bark slabs leaning against each other on overlapping layers three or four thick, with pine needles spread on the floor to sleep on.18 Ponderosa pine roots and gray pine twigs were worked into baskets by native peoples in the American southwest,19 and the art of making pine-needle baskets appears to be undergoing a revival as a contemporary craft.
From early times, shipbuilding was foremost among the uses for the durable and robust timber of pine. Theophrastus said that it was used for merchant ships (fighting ships were built of fir, which weighs less), and John Evelyn quoted the Georgics’ ‘useful pine for ships’, saying:
the true pine was ever highly commended by the Ancients for naval architecture, as not so easily decaying [as the fir]; and we read that Trajan caused vessels to be built out of the true and the spurious kind, well pitch’d and over laid with lead.20
But classical references have to be treated with caution, as poets ignored fine distinctions and chose ‘pine’ or ‘fir’ depending on how they felt the words suited the narrative or metre. Pinus seems to have been a poetic expression for ships generally and could even be extended to mean masts, as in Lucan’s ‘while the lofty pine is raised’, or even to oars. Pine provided planks for the sides of ships and, more importantly, tall, straight trunks for masts. That pine was used for European ships from ancient times into the era of recorded history is borne out by archaeological evidence such as finds preserved in the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde.
Bulk timber, including pine, was important in northern European trade by the time the Hanseatic League developed sometime in the twelfth century. Trees felled in the Baltic region were sawn up and shipped to North Sea ports, pine timber being carried in pine ships. The pine woods of Scandinavia and Eastern Europe must have seemed limitless, giving the easterlings, as the Baltic merchants were called, economic power much resented in England, which had exhausted its native forests by the end of the Middle Ages. The expansion of shipping, for both war and trade, and the need for wood from growing industries, increased demand for pine timber in early modern Europe. Pine, while sought after for specific purposes, was one wood among many; but the European discovery of North America, with its wealth of Pinus species growing as magnificent trees in largely undisturbed forests, led to a huge expansion in the use of the wood, and it became a political and economic bargaining point.
Karl Bodmer, ‘Sioux Tipi’, illustration for Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied’s Maximilian Prince of Wied’s Travels in the interior of North America (1843–4).
Detail of Norwegian stave church built of pine timber and preserved with coatings of pine tar.
Britain, like other European nations, needed pine for ships. In the seventeenth century this was procured at great expense from the Baltic, to Evelyn’s dismay:
What an incredible mass of ready money, is yearly exported into the northern countries for this sole commodity which might all be saved were we industrious at home, or could have more of them out of Virginia.21
This demand was particularly influential as the British Navy expanded during the eighteenth century. Pine timber and pine products, such as pitch and tar, were vital and trade was affected by politics. The size and quality of trees, especially eastern white pine in New England, had been noted by the English authorities, which made attempts to reserve particularly fine ones by marking them with the ‘broad arrow’ indicating government property. This tree, ‘remarkably white when newly sawn into planks; whence the common name’ and ‘more employed in America than any other pine, used for masts’,22 was something they had come to rely on. Eighteenth-century timber duties in Britain gave preference to home and colonially produced wood. In the late eighteenth century, the French made use of supplies of high-quality, easily worked Corsican pine, at that time known as P. laricio:
Ivan Shishkin, Ship Timber, 1887, oil on canvas. The pine woods of both Eurasia and North America were vital for ship building as late as the end of the 19th century. Russian ones were a favourite subject of Shishkin, who painted them in numerous images.
Charles Warren Eaton, The Night, 1911, oil on canvas. The tonalist painter Charles Warren Eaton became known as ‘the pine tree painter’ because he returned to them as a subject again and again, especially the tall eastern white pines.
Previous to the year 1778, the wood was only used by the French government for the beams, the flooring, and the side planks of ships; but in that year the administration sent two engineers to examine the forests of Lonca and Rospa in Corsica, in which abundance of trees were found fit for masts. After this, entire vessels were built with it.23
Alexandre Calame, An Ancient Pine Forest with a Mountain Stream, 1847, sepia and charcoal with gouache on paper.
This was during the American War of Independence (1775–83), a time when the British Navy found its supplies of eastern white pine from New England cut off. Having failed to stockpile timber of the right quality for repairing masts and spars, the British found themselves forced back to the Baltic for timber during the Napoleonic wars, even though the price was driven up 300 per cent in two years.24
This period of high duty on foreign timber briefly allowed exploitation of native pine woods in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus on Speyside, Scotland, recorded this in her memoirs of the years 1797–1830. She was fascinated by the forest (which she invariably referred to as firs), and described how the lochs were dammed, ready to provide a head of water for floating logs at
the proper time for sending them down the streams. It was a busy scene all through the forest, so many rough little horses moving about in every direction, each dragging its load, attended by an active boy as guide . . . This driving lasted till sufficient timber was collected.25
At first, boards were cut in small sawmills close to where trees were felled, but later logs were floated down the River Spey to larger new ones. Estate workmen manoeuvred single logs down streams to the river, where the ‘Spey floaters’, from families who traditionally worked in this trade, took charge of them.
Grant left a vivid description of these men,
to whom the wild river, all its holes and shoals and rocks and shiftings, were as well known as had its bed been dry. They came up in the season, at the first hint of a spate . . . A large bothy was built for them at the mouth of the Druie in a fashion that suited themselves; a fire on a stone hearth in the middle of the floor, a hole in the very centre of the roof just over it where some of the smoke got out, heather spread on the ground, no window, and there, after their hard day’s work, they lay down for the night, in their wet clothes – for they had been perhaps hours in the river – each man’s feet to the fire, each man’s plaid round his chest, a circle of wearied bodies half stupefied by whisky, enveloped in a cloud of steam and smoke, and sleeping soundly till the morning.
Floating the logs had its moments:
There were many laughable accidents during the merry hours of the floating; clips would sometimes fail to hit the mark, when the overbalanced clipper would fall headlong into the water. A slippery log escaping would cause a tumble, shouts of laughter always greeting the dripping victims, who good-humouredly joined in the mirth. As for the wetting, it seemed in no way to incommode them; they were really like water-rats.26
Log rafts on the Peter the Great Canal near St Petersburg, Russia, 1909, glass plate photograph.
After the Napoleonic Wars, timber lost its profitability for Scottish producers. Today, Rothiemurchus includes areas as close to unspoiled native woodland as one can get in Britain. This quiet, open woodland contains trees of all ages, from saplings to ancient ‘granny pines’ with bleached dying branches bare of cover against the vivid bark of still-living, mature trees. The lighter foliage and white bark of birches provides a contrast to the massed dark pines. Juniper, bilberry and crowberry form the understorey over lichens and mosses, among which ants, which make mound-like nests from the fallen pine needles, flourish, together with deer, wildcats, red squirrels, capercaillie and crossbills.
Logging and log driving, common practices in the forests of northern Europe, developed on an enormous scale on the west side of the Atlantic when British duty on foreign timber fell after the Battle of Waterloo. Eastern North America offered huge forests containing many commercially valuable species. Supplies of red pine grew conveniently near major rivers in eastern Canada. As in Rothie murchus, rivers were used for transporting timber. Between 1810 and 1850, most of the accessible timber had been harvested from the river systems of the Miramichi, St John and Ottawa rivers.27
Logging in North America commenced with the first snowfall, although there was much autumn preparation – clearing roads for moving timber, moving provisions and building camps with shanties known as cambooses. These, a bigger version of the Strathspey bothies, housed numbers of lumberjacks in a large communal area heated with a central stove. When the snow began to thaw, the timber drive began. Individual logs floated down small rivers into open water, where they were made into rafts. Raftmen built cabins on them and travelled downriver to centres such as Quebec and St John, where vast numbers were held by floating booms adjacent to the sawmills. Log driving continued even after the railways arrived, as it was more economical than transport by rail.
The trade of floating logs was brutal and dangerous, with the ever-present possibility of falling into freezing water or being crushed. Photographs show the extent of the drives. Films survive to show the speed and skill with which the log drivers worked, stepping nimbly along logs which were ‘birling’, semi-submerged in ice-cold meltwater, both rotating and moving with the current around bends and through rapids, and disentangling the logs from obstructions with long poles armed with hooks on the ends. They have been commemorated in several folk songs. The traditional verses of ‘Grand Voyageur sur la Drave’ tell of three brothers engaged in the trade, and the prospect of descending the river, including the rapids, far from help if an accident took place. ‘River Driver’, a traditional Newfoundland folk song, is about life on the river, and the twentieth-century song ‘The Log Driver’s Waltz’, composed by Canadian musician Wade Hemsworth (1916–2002), tells how the agility and lightness of step acquired by log drivers made them sought-after partners on the dance floor. It was used as the theme for a charming short animated film that was much shown on Canadian television in the 1970s and ’80s.
Due to the demand for timber, between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War much of eastern North America was comprehensively logged. Naturalist Edward W. Nelson (1855–1934) recalled the Adirondacks during the American Civil War as being a
beautiful forest of mixed hardwoods and conifers among which the majestic white pines in all their glory were predominant. Since those days the lumberman’s axe has swept those beautiful conifers almost clean.28
The pine forests of the eastern USA were, quite simply, too useful.
Apart from their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century exploitation for shipbuilding, pines had long been sought after for building and many other purposes. Stephen Elliot remarked of eastern white pine that ‘From its size and lightness it is preferred for the masts of vessels to all other wood’, but also it was
Lumber docks, Jacksonville, Florida, early 1900s.
very extensively used; it is soft, fine grained and light, and free from turpentine; it is therefore used for all the interior work of houses except the floors, and in the Northern States for the covering, and even for the frames.29
Longleaf pine, a major source of tar and turpentine, produces a heavy, robust wood which is hard to work and was
more extensively used than any other species of timber we possess. For the frames, the covering, and even the roofing of houses, it is used wherever cypress cannot be obtained; for the flooring of houses, it is preferred to any wood that is known. It is extensively used in ship-building, for the beams, plank, and running timber of vessels. It is used to make the casks in which we ship our rice, and the fencing of our plantations.30
In 1914, George Russell Shaw commented that loblolly pine was ‘an important tree manufactured into all descriptions of scantlings, boarding’.31 Shortleaf pine was ‘extensively manufactured into material of all kinds that enters into the construction of buildings’.32 The ubiquity of pine gave North American English several slang expressions, including ‘to ride the pine’ (in team sports, to sit on the substitutes’ bench) and ‘pine overcoat’ for a coffin.
Iron and steel ships and construction materials reduced the necessity for timber, but the need for fuel wood and charcoal for industrial purposes increased. Ronald M. Lanner detailed the effects this had on a single species and a small area in the American southwest. Here, the pinyon pines of Nevada do not provide good timber – their wood is knotty and their stature generally moderate – but they were conveniently to hand when a silver-mining rush began in 1859. They were used for fuel wood, for shoring mines, for housing and especially for charcoal for smelting. This was so important that skilled Swiss and Italian labour was imported to produce a supply. The brick kilns these people built still stand, and the demand for fuel for one settlement, Eureka, has been estimated at 20 ha worth of pinyon woodland per day alone in the 1870s (as well as another 8 ha worth for domestic use). By 1878, the landscape within 80 km of the town was completely denuded of woodland, taking the deforested area into the orbit of other silver-producing towns with an equal demand.33
North American forests were treated as if they had no limits, and about 25–30 per cent of each tree was wasted. Railways and steam power made timber extraction, processing and transport easier in the mid-nineteenth century. They brought competition to the pitch and turpentine industries in North Carolina and the southern USA, making lumber viable for ‘timber carpetbaggers’ from the northeast. In the western USA the waste that accompanied early logging operations was phenomenal, as massive and ancient trees such as sugar pines were cut for the most utilitarian of purposes:
much of this valuable resource was squandered from the earliest years of settlement in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the large volume and ease of cutting and working made sugar pine the preferred lumber tree.34
It was used for all the requirements of the sudden influx caused by the gold rush – sluice boxes, bridges, houses, barns, fences, pit props, roofing shingles and livestock fences. Some of it went for other purposes, including novelties such as the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ in Philadelphia, constructed in 1904 for the St Louis World’s Fair. Sometimes over half a tree would be left to rot. Such practices eventually led to both the development of forestry plantations and the establishment of North American national parks.
As wood for furniture, pine is more useful than ornamental, and as ever it would be used if it was to hand. The qualities of the wood vary between species and places of origin; much pine of northern European and North American origin is whitish-yellow or pinkish-red, although ‘pitch pine’ is yellower. Scots pine is relatively close-grained, and North American species imported to Europe in the nineteenth century tended to have a coarser grain,35 perhaps accounting for the splintery nature of Victorian pine floorboards found in many nineteenth-century British houses.
Udo J. Keppler, ‘Who’ll Stand by Him?’, 1909, an illustration for the magazine Puck. Using a forest fire as a visual metaphor for the uncontrolled exploitation of North American forests by timber companies, it shows Gifford Pinchot, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, fighting alone against the flames.
In Britain, with little native pine forest, the wood had to be imported, which made it more expensive before the age of steam than the ubiquity of fitted pine kitchens in the late twentieth century would suggest. As red deal, it arrived from the Baltic and was used for panelling and built-in cupboards (often painted) from the midseventeenth century onwards. Changes in taste away from panelling and falling transport costs led to it being relegated to the servants’ quarters, as a utilitarian wood appropriate for kitchen dressers, rough tables and fittings in sculleries and laundries. Nineteenth-century imports of American pine increased the use for simple, inexpensive furniture of all kinds, and as carcass wood for cheap veneered furniture. A fashion for pale wood furniture – either new, or old pieces stripped of paint or lacquer using caustic solutions – developed in Britain in the 1970s, and pine took its place in this, despite the fact that it tends to darken and turn orangey-red when exposed to light. The pendulum of fashion has swung back towards painted furniture again, this time in the style of Scandinavia, the area in which painted pine furniture might be counted as truly native. Pine, as John Evelyn asserted, can be carved, but is not the choicest wood for this purpose, as it is difficult to undercut.
Udo J. Keppler, ‘Protection!’, illustration for Puck magazine, 1909, when tariffs kept the cost of wood imported to the U.S. high at the cost of eliminating native forests.
A new era in the use of pinewood began in the mid-nineteenth century. Pulping developed from the 1840s onwards, using wood chips treated with motion, heat and various chemicals to free the cellulose they contain from lignin, for papermaking. Other applications were soon found, notably in fibres such as rayon and viscose, first commercially produced in the 1890s. Softwoods generally produce longer fibres than hardwoods, and pines, as species that grow in many environments, are much used for the purpose. The methods are general for all sorts of trees, although pine tends to produce a pulp with colour that needs bleaching if a pure white product is required.36
Pine used in pulping is determined by factors such as what flourishes conveniently close to a pulp factory, grows easily and swiftly, and is resistant to pests and diseases. Pine species that were considered unimportant in the past found new environments and new applications in the age of plantation forestry and industrial wood use. The discovery that Monterey pine grew fast and to exceptional heights in some southern-hemisphere countries resulted in its use as a plantation tree in New Zealand, South Africa and other countries. Virginia pine is now commercially important for pulpwood, despite its poor form – ‘a scrubby species of pine, and its wood is said to be of little value’, said Stephen Elliott in 1824.37 Loblolly pine, pitch pine, red pine, longleaf pine, shortleaf pine, lodgepole pine and jack pine are all quoted as pulpwood species. Like all natural products, individual species have subtleties, but these appear of small account for pulp manufacture, which essentially requires trees or the otherwise useless offcuts of trees, such as small branches and knotty wood, at one end and produces wood pulp, a globally traded commodity, at the other.
Vast quantities of pinewood went into carpentry, cheap furniture and household fittings: here it is used to make laundry troughs at Beningbrough Hall, North Yorkshire, the grain emphasized by years of use.
Postage stamp, New Zealand, 1969, one of an issue designed to draw attention to the country’s main exports. Monterey pine has spread well beyond the original plantations to threaten the native flora of countries such as New Zealand and South Africa.
The industrialization of sawmilling also led to new products such as plywood, spawned from the technology of the newly developed rotary cutter in the 1890s.38 The traditional uses of pinewood in packaging, building and for general use continued alongside, together with new uses in manufactured building materials such as chipboard. In the 1970s wood from Scots pine, Corsican pine and lodgepole pine was listed as being used for making various items such as telegraph poles, railway sleepers, fencing, building timber for joists, rafters and flooring, sheds, pit props, boxes, wood wool, wallboard and paper pulp.39
The over-exploitation of pines and trees generally provoked various reactions, from the establishment of forestry as a science in the countries of the world that were industrializing to a nascent ecological movement, especially in North America. European land owners planted trees both for ornament and as timber in the seventeenth century, but it was the political crises of the late eighteenth century that were a turning point in the history of forestry, as supplies were disrupted and demand increased. This time saw experiments with pine plantations in places as far apart as Scotland, where Scots pine was extensively planted, and in the Dutch colony of Indonesia, where experiments were made with planting Sumatran pine (P. merkusii).
The apparently inexhaustible forests of North America could not withstand the coming of railways and the profit motive, and had to be replanted with trees as a crop. Foreshadowing twentieth-century forestry practices, clear cutting of trees followed by replanting had become a standard practice in Germany in the 1840s. The method spread to the rest of the world, even though in Germany reversion to a more sympathetic method of forestry management took place in the 1870s.40 Deliberate management of forests began in Sweden in the early twentieth century and in Britain after the First World War. Plantation forestry began in North America between the world wars.
Forestry introduced Pinus species to the southern hemisphere on a large scale. The British began to establish plantations of pine trees in their southern-hemisphere colonies in the late nineteenth century (1875 in Australia, about 1884 in South Africa and the 1890s in New Zealand). This has taken Monterey pine, especially, a tree whose natural range in California is about 6,000 ha, to a growing area far beyond anything that was possible under natural circumstances – more than 4 million ha for southern-hemisphere timber plantations.41 Here it flourishes and has become an invasive species, sometimes threatening the original native vegetation, especially in South Africa. Caribbean pine is a successful plantation species for more tropical climates in Brazil and other South American countries, Malaysia and parts of Africa. In places, uncontrolled exploitation of pines still continues, as in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where political anarchy and subsistence agriculture threaten the native forests of Hispaniolan pine. These trees, providers of excellent-quality wood, once supported an export market.42
J.E.H. MacDonald, Tracks and Traffic, 1912, oil on canvas. Stacks of cut pine and other timber as part of a busy industrial cityscape. The telegraph poles which frame the picture left and right may well also have been pine posts.
Intensive forestry to feed demand for timber for construction, pulpwood and other purposes has become associated with blocks of conifers of exotic origin, planted for commercial purposes with little consideration for the landscape. Commercial factors – rapid growth, wood free from knots, resistance to pests and forecasts for demand – are of prime importance. As forestry is a long-term enterprise, there is always the chance that economic circumstances will have changed by the time the trees are ready to harvest, or that growth will not be as good as expected. Thus the lodgepole pine originally planted for timber in Scotland just after the Second World War has limited value and is likely to end up as biomass, or possibly rough packaging wood for pallets and the like.
Pine trees are subject to numerous pests and diseases, many of which have spread as part of human activity. For instance, resin extraction in nineteenth-century North Carolina brought a string of pests in its wake: ips beetles and black turpentine beetles, whose larvae feed on the cambium of the trees; the Southern Pine Sawyer, a moth whose larvae eat the sapwood; and turpentine borers, which feed on the weakened trees, all of which have devastating effects.43 Forestry plantations unintentionally created ideal conditions for some insect pests, such as the pine looper moth (Bupalis piniaria), which attacked UK pinewoods in the 1950s, and pine bast scale (Matsucoccus feytaudi), which almost eradicated maritime pine plantations in southern Europe during the 1960s. Perhaps the worst example of a problem unintentionally spread by human activities happened in 1910, when a shipment of eastern white pine reached North America from France. It was carrying a fungal species (Cronartium ribicola, harboured by plants of the Ribes genus such as redcurrants), which proceeded to spread through the white pines of the continent as white pine blister rust, killing numerous trees, including the magnificent sugar pines that had already been devastated by logging activities. Attempts to control the disease through genetic resistance have led to intensive studies of the affected species.44
L.H. Joutel, ‘Insects affecting White Pine’, illustration from the Seventh Report of the Forest, Fish & Game Commission of the State of New York (1902).
The industrial use of pine trees (as opposed to softwoods generally) is difficult to elucidate. Statistics tend to be broken down into hardwoods and softwoods, or by other factors such as ownership and trunk size. The timber trade recognizes ‘red wood’ (which strictly indicates the wood of Scots pine) and ‘white wood’ (Norway spruce). Pinewood in the UK is widely used for construction, house building, joinery and packaging. That from Finland and Russia was – and still is – favoured, because the northerly environment produces quite slow-growing trees with relatively strong, stout and generally high-quality wood.45 In Britain in the early twenty-first century, conifers account for just over half the total area of forestry; within this category, the most important species is actually Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), accounting for a little over half the area. Scots pine accounts for about another 16 per cent, and lodgepole pine for another 10 per cent.46
Pine trees have made a unique contribution to dendrochronology, the science of dating archaeological and historic remains by tree rings. It originated with observations of Ponderosa pine rings by astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass (1867–1962) in Arizona in 1904. Searching for evidence of the effects of solar phenomena on plant growth, he evolved a method for counting the rings and marking significant morphological details on individual pieces of wood, then cross-matching the details. Douglass’s method, or developments of it, helped to provide chronologies for both North American and European tree rings, wood from the genus Pinus being a major contributor to these. In Europe, a chronology for Scots pine 2,012 years long has been established for the post-glacial era, when the land was too cold for oaks to grow. Many people, however, associate dendrochronology with the spectacularly long-lived bristlecone pines of the Colorado Great Basin. 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.47
A cargo of pine timber washed ashore on the coast of Kent, 2009.
Dendrochronology was used to greatest effect by Douglass himself to date the Anasazi ruins of Pueblo Bonito during the 1920s and ’30s, when he provided dates for 45 monuments. Forensic dendrochronology helped convict Bruno Hauptmann, killer of the Lindbergh baby, when a comparison was made between some low-grade pine used in a ladder left at the kidnap scene and floorboards at Hauptmann’s home. Patterns left by tools and nails suggested that the pieces matched, and examination of tree-ring patterns confirmed the origin.48
Truck load of ponderosa pine (P. ponderosa), Edward Hines Lumber Co. operations in Malheur National Forest, Grant County, Oregon, 1942.
The use of pine for timber and pulp may be impressive when it comes to volume, but pinewood and other parts of the tree were – and are – used in many less obvious ways. There are numerous records of pre-industrial and traditional uses of pinewood for its anti-insect and anti-microbial properties. In the tenth century, Geoponika mentioned putting splints of resinous pinewood into flour, driving pine stakes in around trees and vines to deter grubs, fumigating hen houses with brimstone, asphalt and pinewood, and cleaning olive oil by dropping burned pine cones into it while they were still hot. Charcoal and soot, by-products of pitch extraction, were used from ancient times for smelting, John Evelyn saying that pine charcoal was ‘preffer’d by the Smiths before any other’,49 and that making it and pitch yielded lampblack and printers black for ink.
Lampblack, the sooty residue produced by smouldering pinewood, may seem a fairly minor product, but it was of exceptional importance in China because of the emphasis given to ink here. Records relating to it go back well over 2,000 years. The method for preparing pine soot as described in the seventeenth century AD was careful and complex. If any resin was left in pinewood, the ink would not flow freely, so this was first extracted from the living tree. To do this, a small hole was made at the base and a slow-burning lamp was placed in it. The warmth made the resin gather there and flow out. Then the tree was felled and cut into pieces, which were burned slowly so that the smoke collected in a specially constructed chamber built of bamboo. This was some 30 m long, and had a channelled brick-and-mud floor and a cover of paper and matting that had holes left in it periodically to allow smoke to escape. After several days the chamber was allowed to cool and the soot was scraped out. The method produced various grades of soot, the best of which was collected furthest from the fire. This was used for the finest ink. Other grades made coarser ink for printing, or pigment for lacquer and plasterers. To make ink, the soot was bound with a water- and protein-based glue, resulting in a malleable substance that was shaped into sticks or blocks whose surfaces provided scope for moulded decoration. Sometimes other substances such as perfumes were added. The best ink was highly valued, much sought after and sometimes literally worth its weight in gold, a subject of art and scholarship, producing a deep, lustrous black with qualities that were much admired and borrowed or imitated by other cultures. Mixed with wine or water and other ingredients, it was also used medicinally.50
Making Soot for Ink, illustration to the T’ien Kung K’ai Wu encyclopaedia (1637). The finest and most valued soot came from the end of the structure furthest from the fire, which is being fed with splints of pinewood by a worker.
One of the most visible and ubiquitous uses of pinewood, and possibly the least thought of in the developed world, is in creating light and warmth. Fire runs like a red streak through the human history of pines. This use is difficult for those accustomed to electricity to imagine, but it is still important. Pine banishes the dark, gives warmth and helps start larger fires. The dry, resin-saturated wood splinters and ignites easily.
Pliny the Elder said that pinewood was employed for kindling fires and giving torchlight in religious ceremonies. Torches ran deep in classical mythology and ritual. Demeter carried two flaming torches during her frantic search for her abducted daughter, Kore (Perse phone), and the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, rooted in the myth of Demeter’s search, began with a night-time torch-lit procession. This moved from Athens to Eleusis, about 23 km away, and involved thousands of people; in the otherwise dark landscape the sight must have been extraordinary.51 Hecate also carried torches. She aided Demeter’s search, but in a painting on an amphora is shown fighting the giant Klytios, whose hair she has set ablaze with one of them. Hymen, the god of marriage, carried a torch, and torches were a feature of Greek and Roman weddings, which took place at night. In Euripides’ play Trojan Women, Cassandra, on her way to be ‘married’ as a concubine to Agamemnon, uses words that tell vividly of how their flames appeared:
Pine torches banished the night, and torchlit processions are still impressive. A modern example: New Year in Shetland.
Raise the torch and fling the flame! Flood the walls with holy light! Worship the Almighty Hymen, God of Marriage! . . . I have brought them – torches for my wedding-night, leaping light and dancing flame, in your honour, Hymen, God of hot desire!52
In Medea a ‘torch of frayed pinewood’ is mentioned in a wedding hymn.
Sculptures and frescoes show torches to have been about 1–1½ m long, slender bundles of splints bound together at intervals along their length. Their flames and flickering glow on nights otherwise lit only by the moon and stars were no doubt both impressive and mysterious. They were symbolic of purification as well as giving light. Belief in their power ran deep in the ancient world, and is illustrated in a charm recorded in the tenth century, ‘To prevent enchantment of beehives, fields, houses, animal sheds, and workshops’, which directed the burial of the hoof of the right foreleg of a donkey under the threshold, along with liquid unburned pine resin, salt and various spices, plus a monthly offering of bread, wool, brimstone and pine torches.53
Woodcut illustration to Olaus Magnus, History of the Northern Peoples (1555). Slips of resinous pinewood were used for inexpensive domestic lighting in many places. This example from Sweden in the mid-16th century shows the inhabitants going about daily tasks carrying lit ones in their mouths and bundles of unlit splints in their belts.
The use of slips of pine for lighting persisted well into the nineteenth century in the Western world. It was recorded in Scotland by Elizabeth Grant: ‘the light of a splinter of quick fir Scots pine laid on a small projecting slab within the chimney’ lit chilly winter nights in the cottages;54 and by David Douglas while exploring Oregon in the 1820s. In New England, such slips of pine heartwood became known as candle-wood.
Travellers’ tales of the present day tell of the Dali torch festival in Yunnan Province, China, in which participants carry huge torches, throwing what Western backpackers describe as ‘powdered resin’ at them to produce spectacular sheets of flame, and of pine torches in modern Japan at the Kurama fire festival.
Pine for lighting is ubiquitous in the modern world, although few people give much thought to the origin of the slips of wood found in a box of safety matches. The idea of impregnating slips of pine-wood with sulphur to give something that ignited easily and reliably was recorded in China over a thousand years ago. The friction-ignited safety match, the form now common, was developed in Sweden in the mid-nineteenth century.
Pinewood is also excellent firewood. In Mexico in 1909, George Russell Shaw recorded that a vernacular name for both pines and their wood was ocote and that bundles of kindling were sold in Mexican city markets under the name. It was
obtained by slashing the standing tree, and, after allowing time for the resin to accumulate over the wound, by repeating the process at intervals. The chips are tied in small bundles and are retailed in the markets for one centavo each. Trees badly disfigured by the ocote gatherers are frequently seen.55
To the chagrin of botanists interested in biodiversity, similar practices have continued to the present day in Mexico, the Middle East, the Himalayas and Southeast Asia.
Bundles of pinewood are still sold as kindling for fires in many countries. This example comes from Turkey.
For those for whom log fires are more linked to aesthetic pleasure, pinewood fires are a fragrant, cheerful, crackling luxury on a chilly night. The botanist Ronald M. Lanner remarks that New Mexicans still make candelarias, bonfires with a religious connection inherited from Spanish customs. Backwoods survivalists also make impromptu ‘stoves’ out of pine logs, sometimes called ‘Swedish torches’. About 30 cm in diameter, cloven for most of their length into four, they are lit with a small fire kindled on top and allowed to burn vertically through the wood where the corners of the quarters meet. Once alight, a fire burns down vertically, drawing oxygen through the cuts to keep it going, the top providing a flat surface for heating water or food. The origin of this is variously suggested as backwoods practice in North America, or as something devised by Swedish soldiers during the Thirty Years War (1618–48). The capacity of pinewood to catch fire easily is still useful, and the magic of its light has not been completely extinguished.