The Genus Pinus

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

This discussion of the characters of Pinus is an attempt to determine their taxonomic significance and their utility for determining the limits of the species. A systematic arrangement follows, based on the evolution of the cone and seed from the comparatively primitive conditions that appear in Pinus cembra to the specialized cone and peculiar dissemination of Pinus radiata and its associates. This arrangement involves no radical change in existing systems. The new associations in which some of the species appear are the natural result of another point of view.

Experience with Mexican species has led me to believe that a Pine can adapt itself to various climatic conditions and can modify its growth in response to them. Variations in dimensions of leaf or cone, the number of leaves in the fascicle, the presence of pruinose branchlets, etc., which have been thought to imply specific distinctions, are often the evidence of facile adaptability. In fact such variations, in correlation with climatic variation, may argue, not for specific distinction, but for specific identity. The remarkable variation in the species may be attributed partly to this adaptability, partly to a participation, more or less pronounced, in the evolutionary processes that culminate in the serotinous Pines.

CHARACTERS OF THE GENUS

THE COTYLEDON. , figs. 1-3.

The upper half of the embryo in Pinus is a cylindrical fascicle of 4 to 15 cotyledons (fig. 1). The cross-section of a cotyledon is, therefore, a triangle whose angles vary with the number composing the fascicle. Sections from fascicles of 10 and of 5 cotyledons are shown in figs. 2 and 3. Apart from this difference cotyledons are much alike. Their number varies and is indeterminate for all species, while any given number is common to so many species that the character is of no value.

Primary leaves follow the cotyledons immediately (fig. 4) and assume the usual functions of foliage for a limited period, varying from one to three years, secondary fascicles appearing here and there in their axils. With the permanent appearance of the secondary leaves the green primaries disappear and their place is taken by bud-scales, which in the spring and summer persist as scarious bracts, each subtending a fascicle of secondary leaves. At this stage the bracts present two important distinctions.

1. The bract-base is non-decurrent, like the leaf-base of Abiesfig. 5.2. The bract-base is decurrent, like the leaf-base of Piceafig. 6.

The two sections of the genus, Haploxylon and Diploxylon, established by Koehne on the single and double fibro-vascular bundle of the leaf, are even more accurately characterized by these two forms of bract-insertion. The difference between them, however, is most obvious on long branchlets with wide intervals between the leaf-fascicles.

The bracts of spring-shoots are the scarious bud-scales of the previous winter; but the bracts of summer-shoots have the form and green color of the primary leaf....