Where does Monterey pine come from?
The Monterey pine comes from the central coast of California. In the wild it grows in just three small stands there and on two Mexican islands, yet it has become one of the most widely planted timber trees in the world.
A tree of the fog belt
Wild Monterey pines grow at only three places in a coastal fog belt of central California: one in San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, one around Monterey and one in San Luis Obispo County. A variety with its needles in pairs, not threes, grows on Guadalupe and Cedros islands off Mexico's Baja California. The botanist David Don described the species in 1836 from specimens collected by Thomas Coulter. Its name, radiata, refers to radial markings on some of its cones.
New Zealand's favourite Californian
The pine reached New Zealand in the late 1850s as a trial. The first recorded planting was in 1859 at Mt Peel Station in South Canterbury, and its fast growth led to seed imports from California in the 1870s. In the forestry boom of the 1920s and 1930s it became the species of choice, growing well on many kinds of soil. Today it covers about 1.6 million hectares, close to 90% of the country's plantation forest.
Why people say New Zealand
New Zealanders call it radiata pine, a name that hides its Californian roots, and there it grows about seven times faster than in the United States. Breeding since the 1950s has turned a coarse tree, prone to forked trunks, into straight, tall timber. Radiata is probably the most widely planted plantation conifer in the world, mostly in the southern hemisphere. At home, its three wild stands are threatened by pitch canker, a fungal disease found in California in 1986.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · conifers.org ↗ · teara.govt.nz ↗ · envirohistorynz.com ↗
