So what we're looking at a right now is loblolly pine.
Loblolly pine is a really common pine across the southeast.
It's especially known for its ability to do really well in plantation
settings.
They're planted a lot by industrial forest landowners
because they grow really quickly early on,
get up above the competition, and then because they have really good height
and diameter growth, they're able to use them for
higher end forest products like lumber and
two by fours, plywood, things like that. Loblolly pine is
often found planted in lots of situations.
You may find it planted in old fields. You may find it planted in
kind of upland sites and also in bottomland sites. Loblolly pine was actually found
naturally in bottoms and drains. If you think about the common name of
loblolly, you gotta think about what does loblolly mean
and I ask my students this a lot, "What is the word loblolly mean?"
and a lot of them don't know that it's actually an old-timey word for a mud
hole.
I'd always tell my students to or always say that my grandma used to tell me
you know, Becky, when I was little said, 'Becky don't go out there
and get your
clean clothes dirty and wallow around in that loblolly.' and essentially what she was telling
me was stay out of the mud hole
and stay clean. So that's something to remember - loblolly really does a lot better
in bottomland sites rather than in upland sites.
A lot of times, people plant loblolly in uplands and then they start to have lots
of cones in the crown as they get a little older.
Maybe they started to - you can see one or two here or there dying back
and this is really kind of loblolly's last effort to
to reproduce to get seed on the ground before
it dies so that's really something that's kind of a warning sign. If you
have loblolly pine and
you're starting to see it lots and lots of cones in the crown,
you may want to have your forester come out and take a look at it
and see if there's
something maybe that needs
to be done because you may have a lot mortality in the near future.
Loblolly actually really is kind of a nutrient hog in some cases where it needs a
lot of water.
It needs a lot of nutrients, so poorer sights, rocky sites
loblolly just doesn't do as well. Loblolly also
has a really light seed and so it can blow for long distances
and so historically when
historical forests were cut, when like the longleaf forests were cut historically,
loblolly was one those first early pioneer species because the seed blow for a long
way.
Loblolly doesn't do very well with fire
because again it was found in these moister areas so historically as fire
moved across the landscape,
it would kinda fizzle out literally and figuratively as it got into those
bottoms
and so what would happen is that loblolly kind of evolved to be
not as fire tolerant as some of the other pine species. So again, loblolly
doesn't do as well with fire. When they get older you can use fire
in the understory but on younger loblolly like these
behind me, a lot of times they don't do as well. They can be killed by even
low-intensity fires in part because they have limbs they go all the way pretty
much to the ground when they're younger
and that kind of acts as a fire ladder and can just bring the fire right on up into
the crown and
eventually kill the trees.
A lot of times people have a hard time identifying the different southern pines and it can be sort
of confusing
but there's some things to remember when you're looking at loblolly. One is
the cone. The cone is kind of smaller
but when the most notable things about the cone is that when you touch it it
has these little
spikes on the edges so it makes it very prickly when you pick it up sometimes.
Some people find it very uncomfortable to pick up because it does have these
sharp burs
on the ends of the cone.
So that's one thing to identify. Again it's not a very large cone
- five to six inches long. Another way to identify them is through the
needles.
You can see here the needles on this younger
loblolly pine- they are they do kind of run down
the new growth, run down the stem and they're usually
in bundles in the fascicle of three so
usually you can tell a loblolly because they're usually
in bundles a three. One other thing to think about when you're looking at
loblolly in helping to identify it's of
note to think about the bark. The bark on loblolly is
not as thick as that on some other other in Southern Pines.
You can see when it's younger it can be a little bit flaky, but again the bark layer on
loblolly is very thin and again that comes from the fact that it it has
evolved without fire for the most part and is not
a very fire tolerant species especially when it's younger.