There is a stretch of the A339, between Basingstoke and Kingsclere, where the road bends past a golf course and the trees at the edge of the fairway start to look not quite right. Taller than the pines around them. Denser. A little too green for an April morning. Stop the car, walk a few yards into the verge, and you may find one of these at your feet — a Monterey pine cone larger than you expect, lopsided, almost lumpen, the scales fanned out in an asymmetrical spiral that makes you want to turn it slowly in your hand. It has been waiting for you a long time.
A Monterey pine cone, in the hand
Pick it up and turn it. The first thing to notice is that it is not symmetrical. One side of the cone is stockier, the scales on that side flatter and more pronounced; the other tapers more gently. Each scale ends in a small raised pyramid — an apophysis, if you want the botanical word, though "small wooden shield" does the job just as well — and at the centre of each, a hard little point called the umbo. Nothing about this cone is dainty. It is an object built for patience, and the weight of it in the palm is the first thing that tells you so.
Hold it closer. In the half-open gaps between the scales, paper-winged seeds are visible, slim and ready, tucked against the stem. The woody heft of the cone makes those seeds look almost delicate by comparison. That contrast — the armour and the thing it is protecting — is the whole point of this cone. It has been built for keeping. And the faint resinous smell, still rising after all this time on the forest floor, is the last trace of the tree that made it.
The emigrant tree
Pinus radiata is not, strictly, a British tree. In the wild it grows in three small strips of central California — a short stretch around Monterey itself, a scrap at Año Nuevo, and a hillside near Cambria. That is the whole native range. A few square miles of coastal fog and salt wind. In its home, it is listed as endangered.
It arrived in Britain in 1833, in a consignment of seeds collected by David Douglas — the Scottish plant hunter who also, incidentally, gave his name to the Douglas fir — and was first planted in the mild gardens of Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. From there it spread inland wherever the winters were kind enough: Victorian estate grounds, Edwardian arboreta, the borrowed-American aesthetic of the early golf courses. The south of England turned out to suit it. A chalky, well-drained soil and a mild winter are all it asks for, and the band of country running from the North Wessex Downs across into Surrey, Sussex, and the New Forest gives it both. It took to Britain the way a plant takes to a country that has been quietly waiting for it. It grows faster here than at home. There are Monterey pines in Hampshire, still only a few decades old, that tower over much older native trees beside them.
It took to Britain the way a plant takes to a country that has been quietly waiting for it.
Why the cone was closed
A cone like the one in your hand is an heirloom. On the tree itself, Monterey pine cones can hang closed — tightly closed — for decades. In California, where they evolved, this made sense. Fires come through that landscape periodically, and the cones have been calibrated, by millennia of them, to open only in the presence of real heat. A hot fire passes through, the tree sometimes dies, the cone splits in the sudden warmth, and the seeds fall onto ground that has been freshly cleared. The next generation rises in the ashes of the last. It is a deal struck with fire.
In Britain, that particular bargain never gets struck. There is no wildfire through a Hampshire pine stand. The cones simply stay on the tree until, with the glacial slowness of a plant that is used to waiting, time and weather do the work instead. They open gradually, in the damp, through one British winter, and another, and another, and eventually fall. Hardy would have recognised the tree — carrying in itself the memory of a country it has not seen for generations, still keeping faith with a weather that no longer comes. You are holding, in other words, a patience. Something waiting for a fire that was never going to arrive, and that opened itself anyway, because the plant had somewhere to be.
Where to find one in Britain
Anywhere the winters are mild and the soil drains well. The south-west has the grand old specimens — Penjerrick near Falmouth, Tresco's Abbey Garden, the formal grounds at Trelissick — and the mild west coast of Scotland has the best northern outposts, particularly at Inverewe, where a shelterbelt of them has been doing its quiet Californian work since the 1870s. But the band of country that really suits it now is further inland: the chalk and sand of the North Wessex Downs, the quiet estate woods along the A339, the edges of New Forest plantations, older golf courses in Surrey and Sussex where Edwardian designers liked the Californian silhouette. Once you know what to look for, one will be somewhere along any drive through the south of England — an odd tree, fuller than the pines around it, with needles in bunches of three where Scots pine carries two.
Taller than they ought to be. A little too green for a January sky. Dropping asymmetrical cones onto ground the tree has, over two centuries, come to know.
There is something unexpectedly moving about an emigrant tree. A Californian pine, on an English hillside, quietly at home in a place that turned out to need it. You can put the cone back where you found it, or you can take it home — they are beautiful things on a windowsill, and the slow opening continues indoors, faintly perfumed, for years. Either way, look up once before you move on. The tree above you is older than the road you are standing beside, and doing, without any visible effort, something that ought not to have worked.
Walk the lanes behind Kingsclere, or the footpaths off the A339, or any of the older Hampshire estate woods. You will find them — and, more often than you might expect, something of Britain's own story folded quietly inside a cone from another coast. If you like the idea of these slow arrivals from elsewhere, the cherry blossom is another of them — an import that has so thoroughly become part of the British spring that we forget it was ever foreign.
