Pining for home

PINE trees have always confused me.

- Alan Titchmarsh

The confusion dates back to my days as a student at Kew Gardens when, every Friday for three years, we would be faced with 20 plant specimens to identify with their family, genus species and variety. They would be drawn from what must rank as the largest and most comprehensive plant collection in the world, so the canvas was pretty broad. Trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and bulbous plants, from equatorial rainforest to Arctic tundra and mountain scree, were all fair game and, after a year or two, our plant vocabulary was of a breadth and depth that few outside that august institution could match.

One particular Friday saw most of us stumped, however. Each of the 20 glass specimen vases contained a different species of pine. The dwarf Pinus mugo was an easy one to tick off and the soft and feathery Bhutan pine, P. wallichiana, was a bit of a shoo-in, too, but that left 18 whose identity had to be narrowed down by the number of needles carried in each cluster—two, three or five. Shirley Conran had yet to opine that ‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom’, but the sentiment was shared.