The Hard Pines

THE HARD PINES The hard pines are a group of needle-leaved evergreens, whose leaf bundles contain two or three needles, as a rule. • The wood is heavy, usually dark in colour, and saturated with a resinous, gummy sap. The common name, " pitch pine," refers to the resinous wood; it is much harder to work with than that of soft pines. The most valuable hard pine forests grow in the Southern states. These are now the chief sources of pine lumber in the Eastern half of the continent. They furnish also quantities of tur

pentine, pitch, tar, and oil, products of the resin ous sap which saturates the wood of these trees while they are growing.

One trait of the pitch pines is that they retain the leaf sheath. The soft pines shed the sheath as soon as the leaf bundle has attained its full length.