The Cretan Pine of the Botanic Garden

Beekeepers know this species better than gardeners do. Pinus brutia draws bees that produce a honey people actively seek out, and its timber is fine enough for luxury furniture, which is a strange pair of credentials for a tree standing quietly in a university collection. What gets it onto the monumental register is the trunk. It runs 30.1 metres straight up, 3.39 metres around at the base, carrying a comparatively narrow crown of 17.3 metres. The word the garden's own writers use is rectilinear, and it is the right one. Old Mediterranean pines usually lean, fork or flatten themselves into an umbrella against the wind. This one went up like a mast and stopped. The species comes from Crete, western Turkey and the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean, which is why Spanish signage calls it the pino de Creta while English usage has settled on Turkish Pine. It is a close relative of the Aleppo Pine growing wild all along this coastline, and the two are separated by needle length and by the way the cones sit on the branch, which is worth knowing if you are trying to tell them apart on a walk. No age is recorded for it. The register carries measurements and no dates, and no planting note for this tree has surfaced anywhere else, so how long it has been standing here is genuinely unknown. If you know, tell us.