Pinus wallichiana

The Himalayan white pine is one of the most graceful of the large conifers, a broad, elegant tree hung with long, soft, blue-green needles that droop from the branches in feathery sweeps. Borne five to a bundle in the manner of the white pines, the needles give the whole tree a silvered, weeping softness, and the long, resinous, banana-shaped cones dangle among them like ornaments.

Native to the high Himalaya, from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Nepal and Bhutan to the edge of China, the tree grows on cool mountain slopes between roughly six and thirteen thousand feet. The epithet wallichiana honors Nathaniel Wallich, the Danish surgeon-botanist who ran the Calcutta Botanic Garden and sent the first seed west in the early nineteenth century. Gardeners know the pine as Himalayan white pine, Bhutan pine, or blue pine, for those cool-toned needles.

One honest caution belongs at the front of any description. This is a cool-climate mountain pine, at home in USDA zones 5 to 7, and the species resents the heat and humidity of the Deep South; even in cooler inland gardens the pine can be tricky, and in the hot, muggy low country the tree tends to struggle. Grow this one where summers stay relatively mild, in full sun and well-drained soil, with some shelter from fierce, drying wind that can brown the needles.

Where the climate suits, Pinus wallichiana makes a magnificent specimen or shade tree, casting dense shade under a broad, sweeping crown, more tolerant of city air than many pines and, as a Himalayan white pine that co-evolved with blister rust, generally untroubled by that scourge of the American white pines. In the Himalaya the resinous wood serves for timber, torchwood, and turpentine. For the right garden, this is a conifer of rare elegance; for the wrong one, an honest nursery will tell you to look elsewhere.