Terry L. Ettinger Horticulture Consulting Services
Meeting The Needs Of Today With A Vision For The Future
Special Topics
Overgrown Evergreens
Pine (Pinus)
Featured in many landscape plantings, weeping white pine, at right, is far from a small plant. In fact, it can
grow as tall as it's staked and can spread more than twenty feet in all directions at the rate of one to two feet per year!
There simply are very few reliably dwarf
pines except for the TRU-dwarf™ mugo pine cultivars being
developed and marketed by Iseli Nursery in Boring, Oregon - including `Mops’ and `Slowmound’ mugo pines listed below
(and I question just how small some of these cultivars really will be over the course twenty to thirty years - plus they tend
so be susceptible to both European pine sawfly and pine needle scale).
On a personal note, several years ago, my Dad finally had to remove a grafted dwarf
white pine that I had given to
him as a very small plant in 1981. It had grown to about five feet high and ten feet wide and was starting to overwhelm his
neighbor’s cloths line!
- Swiss Stone Pine
- (Pinus cembra)
- Six to ten inches per year
- Forty feet tall and ten to fifteen feet wide
- `Tanyosho' Japanese Red Pine
- (Pinus densiflora 'Umbraculifera')
- Four to six inches per year
- Twenty feet tall and twenty feet wide
- `Vanderwolf’s Pyramid' Limber Pine
- (Pinus flexis 'Vanderwolf’s Pyramid')
- More than twelve inches per year
- Forty to sixty feet tall and twenty to thirty feet wide
- Dwarf Mugo Pine
- (Pinus mugo var. pumilio)
- One to ten inches or more per year
- Two to fifteen feet tall and two to twenty feet wide
- `Mops' Mugo Pine
- (Pinus mugo `Mops')
- One to two inches per year
- Two to four feet tall and two to four feet wide
- `Slowmound' Mugo Pine
- (Pinus mugo `Slowmound')
- Three to six inches per year
- Three to five feet tall and four to eight feet wide
- Austrian Pine
- (Pinus nigra)
- Eight to twelve inches or more per year
- Forty to sixty feet tall and twenty to forty feet wide
- White Pine
- (Pinus strobus)
- Two to three feet per year
- Sixty to one hundred feet tall and twenty to forty feet wide
- Columnar White Pine
- (Pinus strobus `Fastigiata')
- One to two feet per year
- Fifty to seventy feet tall and twenty to thirty feet wide
- Dwarf White Pine
- (Pinus strobus `Nana')
- Three to six inches per year
- Fifteen to twenty feet tall and fifteen to twenty feet wide
- Weeping White Pine
- (Pinus strobus `Pendula')
- One to two feet per year
- Five to fifteen feet tall and more than twenty feet wide
- `Thunderhead’ Japanese Black Pine
- (Pinus thunbergiana `Thunderhead')
- Six to ten inches per year
- Twenty feet tall and twenty feet wide