Powerful Pine

Mexican pinyon pine belongs on a dry mountainside in the American Southwest, not in a Spokane arboretum with a state-record willow and Chinese dawn redwoods for neighbours. The city's Heritage Tree Register names this one among the largest of its kind anywhere in Washington, a low, broad-crowned pine spreading more than 40 feet across on a trunk only about 33 feet tall. That shape is the species doing what it always does. Pinus cembroides grows slow and wide rather than tall, built for wind and drought rather than for competing with taller trees for light, which is close to the opposite of everything else growing around it at Finch Arboretum. Only the register has recorded it, and no second account has come forward to confirm the figures or the ranking. Treat "one of the largest in the state" as one institution's claim rather than a settled fact, the same caution due every single-sourced tree on this page. Find it near the willow and the redwoods, a short walk that makes an afternoon of it.