A jack pine keeps its cones locked shut with resin and waits for a forest fire to open them. Heat melts the seal, the scales spring apart, and the seed lands on ground that has just been cleared of competition. That is the tree the Friends of the Central Experimental Farm stop at as number 18 on their CelebriTrees walk, and the reason they stop is a painting. The jack pine is the species Tom Thomson made famous, the leaning Algonquin Park silhouette that became one of the best known images in Canadian art. This particular pine never saw Algonquin. The National Capital Commission's register records it as planted in 1921 at the Dominion Arboretum, a documented date rather than an estimate, which makes it roughly 105 years old and one of the better dated trees in Ottawa. It has stood through a century of the Experimental Farm working as a research station in the middle of a growing capital. The Friends' tour gives the height of its jack pine as about 20 metres. The register and the tour share no tree number, so that stop is matched to this trunk by species and by position on the same lowland path rather than by any common reference. Take the height as corroboration rather than as a measurement of this exact stem. Nobody has published a girth.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Dominion Arboretum, Central Experimental Farm, Ottawa, ON (along the lowland path, about 50m north of the woodland intersection)
You can recognise it by the cones, sealed shut with resin instead of opening. It stands on the lowland path through the Arboretum's woodland section, about 50 metres north of the woodland intersection.
About a 10-15 minute walk from Dow's Lake, where the Century Willow and Turn-of-the-Century Linden (ott_013, ott_014) stand at the south end of Queen Elizabeth Driveway; OC Transpo stops serve Prince of Wales Drive and Carling Avenue at the farm's edges.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
- In the official register: National Capital Commission
- National Capital Commission (NCC), 'A Living Legacy: Remarkable Trees of Canada's Capital' (objectid 64, NCC 'A Living Legacy')
- friendsofthefarm.ca