Pitch pines
Today, we spare a thought for the humble pitch pine. Whether you view it as an iconic landscape feature or a view-hogging monoculture, good old Pinus rigida has been part of our local ecology since the Wampanoag tended the forests of Cape Cod, working in harmony with nature.
Pitch pines joined a healthy mix of oak, beech, walnut and locust as citizens of the boreal forest. In pre-colonial times, America’s first peoples used controlled burns and other sophisticated forestry techniques to create hunting preserves and agricultural clearings while maintaining woodland biodiversity.
European colonizers began the process of coastal clearing in the 1600s. Through the 18th century, the neglected interior forests of the Cape succumbed to advancing “civilization”: First the low pines and scrub oak, for fuel, then the tall hardwoods, for construction and shipbuilding. Intensive sheep grazing finished off the remaining vegetation, and soil erosion began, by around 1820, to silt in the harbors of Wellfleet and Truro. Reforestation began in the mid-19th century, led by the intrepid pitch pine, which was promoted to help hold what remained of the sandy topsoil. With the advent of tourism and decline of agriculture in the 20th century, the remaining open land on the Cape reverted to forest. Fire suppression efforts, begun in the 1940s to protect increasing property values, accelerated the march of the pitch pine across our landscape, until it became the dominant feature it is today.
The realtor who sold us our land told us that when she was a girl, in the 1960s, you could stand on Route 6 and enjoy an uninterrupted view down Fishermans Road to the water. The reforestation that took place on the Inner Cape had not yet reached as far as Truro, much of which remained active farm land. Cranberry Hill would have been a place of long vistas, open sky, scrub oak, beach plum, bayberry, bearberry, blueberry and heath. (If you walk along Great Hollow Road from the beach on up to Savory, you will see on your right an example of this native heath land on a slope up to the right, with a few pines starting to crop up, like early invaders.)
An article a few years back in the Cape Cod Times explains a bit about why the pitch pine is so rampant, so successful in carpeting the landscape. Pitch pines are “allelopaths,” aggressively crowding out all other species in the interest of promoting their own kind. “With a life expectancy of only 75 years, the pitch pine simply plops itself down and starts growing big bushy branches without any long-term planning. Pitch pine not only pushes other trees aside with its branches, it also blankets the ground in three-part needle clusters that release a chemical that makes the soil undesirable for other rooting trees. Pitch pine's got the James Dean strategy: Live hard, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.”
Forestry on the Cape these days has been a process of beating back the pitch pines to restore some of the biodiversity the Wampanoag and other first peoples managed so beautifully for hundreds of years. While pitch pines are valuable habitat for crows, nuthatches, woodpeckers and other bird species (not to mention squirrels), oaks and beeches also need room to thrive, as do the coastal heaths and grasslands that shelter a variety of meadow birds and others species. Pitch pines that are close to houses are not only an enemy to native landscaping, but a potent fire hazard, with their dry branchwork and flammable sap. Finally, as with every monoculture, a forest only containing pitch pines is vulnerable to disease and infestation - as we have seen in recent years with the pine bark beetle.
Managing pitch pines in your landscape requires patience and planning. Keep a healthy stand to the side for bird habitat, but consider maintaining open areas for other native species to fill in - blueberry fields, grasses and bayberry. Topping pitch pines invariably kills them, leaving a vector for poison ivy growth and harmful insects that can spread to healthy specimens. And If you see a pitch pine on your property with a hole in the trunk, and sap pouring out, it is time to take it down: once the pine bark beetles settle in, that tree is a goner.
Enjoy the native landscape of Cape Cod, in all its diversity!