The Best Pine Trees: 41 Noteworthy Varieties

The Best Pine Trees: 41 Noteworthy Varieties

If you’ve been in the ornamental landscaping game for any amount of time, you’ve probably figured out that pine trees are quintessential coniferous evergreens.

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Along with flaunting aesthetic beauty, pines are ecologically important, culturally significant, and the edible pine nuts of some species are an essential ingredient in pesto sauce, a condiment that never fails to improve the taste of plain pasta.

Featuring at least 180 species, the Pinus genus, from the Pinaceae family, is a fantastic place to look if long-lived conifers with needy evergreen foliage are what you’re after. From the pines out in the landscape to the ones decking the halls ’round Christmas time, there’s many a Pinus to enjoy.

In this guide, we cover 41 different kinds of pine trees and touch on the features that make them special and readily identifiable. Depending on your landscape’s location, you won’t be able to grow them all – but you’ll certainly want to. 

Here’s the list of said pines that we’ll cover up ahead:

Hardy in USDA Zones 9 to 11, P. halepensis hails from the Mediterranean region of Europe, but it’s also cultivated in the United States.

With an upright, rugged, and irregularly-branching habit, this tree has a mature height and spread of 50 to 80 feet, narrow two- to four-inch reddish-brown cones, and two- to four-inch bright green needles in bundles of two.

An especially heat-resistant conifer, the Aleppo pine was thought to be cut down and decorated by Ancient Greeks every year, a ritualistic tradition that early Christians adopted for their