Italian Stone Pine

Below documents the first styling of an old stone pine (pinus pinea). Originating from a collection in Auckland, this first came to our garden early summer 2024. With an exceptional lower trunk, it holds some fantastic attributes.

The pine as it came into our garden.

Collected off a clay cliff in Auckland a long while back, it had retained it's wild feel, thus we came at this first styling from a raw material perspective. Over the years it had lost much of its interior and lower branching, so some heavy bending was in order...

The original, overly heavy trunk line (cyan).

There was a large thick branch heading off to the right that had originally been the primary trunk line, but we removed this entirely. Utilising 3 wedge cuts, we brought a branch in from the back and built out the new trunk line. This resulted in the much more compact design below.

After styling

See below image illustrating where the 3 wedge cuts were performed to create the new primary line. The branch highlighted in magenta is sacrificial branching, kept as a fail safe in case the new trunk line doesn't succeed (highly recommended if performing large wedge cuts).

3 wedge cuts (cyan) & sacrificial branching (magenta).

The below photos show how much wood was removed to create the first bend to enable heavy back branch to come over as new trunk line. (Apologies I didn't get proper documentation shots of the process from the start, got carried away with the work and only thought about it midway through as per...) The partially remaining 'teared up' jin is all that remains of the large original trunk. This remaining deadwood helps disguise the large wedge cut once branch is fully folded into place.

Most of the way through folding of the branch, but before completing bend entirely...

View form the back, we have only left approx 5mm of tissue.

Looking forward to seeing this tree progress, it holds the potential to be a stellar tree in years to come owing to its powerful trunk and movement.

Thick bark plates

We get quite a few queries about stone pine for bonsai, likely due to garden centres stocking them in the edible area for pine nut production.

A few key points about Italian Stone Pine (pinus pinea):

• A rather vigorous grower.

• Multi-flush.

• Has a 'juvenile' foliage flush.

• Develops beautiful thick bark plates that tend to hold their length similar to Japanese red pine.

• Has a distinctive red hue to it's bark, again similar to Japanese red pine.

• All in all, a fantastic species to work with.