HIMALAYAN WHITE PINE

With its vibrant needles and graceful shape, Pinus wallichiana earns space as a standalone tree

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About 50 million years ago,

India was a large island off the Australian coast.

In one of the great tectonic movements of the Earth’s crust, India sailed off northward at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year, crunching into the Asian land mass. It heaved up the hulking Eurasian plate and created the east-west-oriented Himalayan mountains and the high, lonely stretches of Tibet.

From Afghanistan on the west to Tibet on the east, the Indian plate slowly crunched northward, but on its eastern side, it also crunched eastward, forming north–south mountains. A look at a topographical map shows these folded ranges, where a horticultural menagerie of plants found nowhere else on earth can be located.

Why the geology lesson? Because in the northern part of the Indian plate, from the high deserts of Afghanistan, east across the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountain ranges and then down into the north-south ranges around Yunnan, China, is the land where the final selection in our 2023 series of specimen plants is native: Pinus wallichiana.

Other common names of this pine are Bhutan pine, Himalayan white pine and blue pine—among several more. The “blue” refers to the bluish cast of the needles, especially in the subspecies ‘Nana.’