Will: You wrote:
>> The tallest white pines will soon be the young ones Jess Riddle found in > northern GA. These trees are around 70-80 years old and over 185'. Will--can you verify that these 185 foot tall white pines are only 70 to 80 years old? If so, in my mind that ends the discussion about the possibility of 250 foot tall white pines. I would say, of course white pines did grow and will grow, to 250 feet tall. But, please forgive me, if I am skeptical. On the best sites--and the best strains--white pines "normally" grow to 120 feet in 50 years. Now I have a good strain of white pines growing on my timberland on a good class II soil, the kind of site that with the best strain could produce a tree 120 feet tall in 50 years. Mine are on track to make about 95 feet. So, I know from experience that 120 feet in 50 years is not very common. The outstanding stand near Parsons, WV that I mentioned earlier. is the best I have ever seen, and those trees grew near 120 feet in 50 years. I tried to do some estimations a few years ago and thought they had grown 115 in 50 years. Here is where I have difficulty--knowing what I do about white pine growth curves, I would guess for a tree to reach 185 feet in 75 years (the mid point of the estimate of ages), they would have had to have grown very close to 160 feet in 50 years. Now this is simply off the scale of anything that has, as far as I know, been recorded. I can believe that the site index maximum of 120 feet is not an absolute max. It is a good figure to work with for the best strains growing on the best sties. I can imagine 130 feet might be possible in exceptional circumstances--maybe a foot or two more. I can't set any absolute limit. But 160 feet? even 145 feet? Now that would be a spectacular revelation and would not make sense in the context of all I have learned about white pine growth possibilities. There has been some discussion of finding one of these old white pine masts. If one could be found, then one could get a definitive answer. It could be sliced very carefully, very thinly, and one could track each year's growth. This slicing is what was done by SUNY Syracuse with a large number of trees when they did the growth curves for Norway spruce. They sliced these trees so carefully that they could see every single year's growth profiled individually, and they could see each time the tree was attacked aby a weevil, thus killing the leader, etc. etc. In fact, if they chose a tree, and had it sliced, and it was determined that it had suffered a weevil atttack more than just a two or three of times, they discarded that tree and selected another to slice for their data. If a mast could be found, you could tell exactly how fast the tree grew each year, and each and every time the leader may have been broken, etc. etc. No questions would remain unanswered. Then one could make appropriate projections. --Gaines
