Pond Pine

Size, growth and what to expect

Pond pine grows at a medium pace, about a foot and a half a year in our growth estimator. On wet peat it grows far more slowly. Trees in a North Carolina pocosin averaged 28 feet at 20 years and 49 feet at 50. It matures at 40 to 70 feet with an open, irregular crown.

Pollen flies in March and April, and the cones ripen about 18 months later, in September and October of the next year. The round cones are 2 to 3 inches long and can stay on the tree for up to 10 years. It feeds the caterpillars of the imperial moth, as well as songbirds and small mammals.

It grows wild on the Coastal Plain from Cape May, New Jersey, to central Florida and southeastern Alabama. Most wild stands date from a fire, which clears the brush from the seedbed. In the pocosins it can take over after a fire kills Atlantic white cedar.

How to grow Pond Pine

Pond pine wants full sun and takes light shade. It needs an acid soil of sand, loam or peat that stays moist to wet. Mature trees stand long flooding, though they grow slowly in it. It grows faster where the soil drains between wet spells. Wind can damage it, so plant it 25 feet from a wall, and set trees 20 feet apart for a grove. Keep it more than 50 feet from overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant while it is dormant, from late fall to early spring, in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper. Set the root flare at the soil line, put the native soil back in, and keep the mulch clear of the trunk. Seed needs about a month of cold, damp storage in the refrigerator. Sow it in spring, pressed into the surface of a moist bed and covered thinly with pine straw. Keep the bed moist but never flooded.

Water weekly through the first summer unless the ground stays wet. Keep grass and brush pulled back for the first few years, since competition slows young pond pines. It is resistant to deer. Prune only dead or broken limbs.

Each tree carries both male and female cones and the wind carries the pollen, but a lone tree tends to set less seed than trees in a group. Trees start to bear cones at 4 to 10 years, and large crops come every year. Southern pine beetle, black turpentine beetle and engraver beetles attack it. Fusiform rust cankers its stems, though it is half as susceptible as loblolly pine. Old trees often carry red heart, a trunk rot.