On a cold winter’s day, with the sun dipping in and out of the clouds, we walked the neighborhood to admire what many people call pines, trees that are green year-round.
Actually, those evergreens aren’t all pines. Likely, you have pines, spruces, cedars, and, to a lesser extent, firs in your neighborhood. They are all conifers, trees with needle-like or scale-like leaves, that bear cones holding seeds. Some trees, like tamarack and bald cypress, are deciduous conifers that bear cones but lose their leaves in winter.
Conifers have grown on Earth for at least 150 million years, when dinosaurs roamed the land. Brachiosaurus, the dinosaur that stood more than 50 feet tall, likely ate conifer and tree fern needles.
These were not the same conifer species we find in our northern Illinois landscapes today, but it’s fascinating to think about how long this group of plants has been on Earth. One such species, the Wollemi pine, which grew during dinosaur days, was thought to be extinct until it was recently discovered growing in a canyon near Sydney, Australia.
I’d love to see that tree, and indeed some dinosaurs that munched on its needles, but in the 21st century, I must be content with walking the neighborhood viewing red pine, Colorado blue spruce, white spruce, Norway spruce, eastern red cedar and white cedar.
We found all these conifers just a block away from home, where various evergreens served as the main landscape of someone’s yard. Later, we found a few eastern white pines, one of the few pine species native to northern Illinois, the other two being jack and red pines, both very rare in their natural habitat.
White Pines State Forest in Ogle County, hosts the largest natural stand of white pines in the state. I’ve been there, and it’s lovely to walk among the white pines with their long, soft needles.
A pine has slender needles that vary from fairly short to very long in bundles of two, three or five. Spruces and firs don’t have this arrangement, plus the needles tend to be much shorter than pines.
I learned in a tree-identification class long ago that red pines have bundles of two needles and white pines have five.
To differentiate between fir and spruce, pull off a needle and roll it between your fingers. “If it feels flat and doesn’t roll easily, it’s a fir. If the needle has four sides and, thus, rolls easily between your fingers, it’s a spruce,” writes blogger Steve Aitkin, a former editor of “Fine Gardening” magazine.
I took a needle off our Norway spruce and another off a blue spruce and easily rolled it between my fingers. The needles on my neighbor’s balsam fir were too high for me to reach, so I couldn’t test that theory.
Firs often have softer needles than spruces, and when I touched the tip of a Colorado blue spruce, ouch!
White cedars have short needles in dense clusters, while eastern red cedars have flatter leaves.
Cone shapes and sizes also offer identity clues. Pines have woody cone scales and feel rigid and unbreakable. Spruce cones have papery scales and are flexible. Cedar cones are small and fragile and stand upright on branches as opposed to pine cones, which mostly hang downward.
In eastern red cedar, the female cones are just a quarter-inch long and dark blue with a gin-like fragrance. The female parts of evergreens are called the cones, while the male parts of the tree are called catkins, which look like smaller bundled cones.
Norway and Colorado blue spruces are fairly common in our neighborhood, and though they aren’t native, they are popular trees to plant in cities and suburbs. Over time, I’ve grown less fond of the blue spruces. I’m more partial to Norway spruces because they attract two of my favorite birds, Cape May warblers in spring and red-breasted nuthatches, boreal forest dwellers, in winter.
One activity I enjoy while standing next to a conifer is to rub my fingers across the needles, inhale the fragrance, and close my eyes. Then I am transported to the great north woods, where many more of these evergreens flourish.
