The shortleaf pine is peculiar among eastern softwoods in one respect. Stumps will sprout. That occurs oftener west of the Mississippi than east. However, the tree’s ability to send up sprouts from the stump is of little practical value, since the sprouts seldom or never develop into merchantable trees. In that respect it differs from the other well-known sprouting softwood of this country, the California redwood, whose numerous sprouts grow into large trunks.
SPRUCE PINE (_Pinus glabra_). This is one of the softest and the whitest of the hard pines of this country. Nothing but its scarcity stands in the way of its becoming an important timber tree. The best of it is a satisfactory substitute for white pine in the manufacture of doors. It grows rapidly, and the wide rings contain a high percentage of light colored springwood, though there is enough summerwood of darker color to give the dressed lumber a character. It weighs about the same as northern white pine, but is weaker. In South Carolina and Florida it is called white pine, but the name spruce is more general. It is known also as kingstree, poor pine, Walter’s pine, and lowland spruce pine. Its range is restricted to southern South Carolina, northern Florida and southern Alabama and Mississippi, and northeastern Louisiana. Its leaves are from one and a half to three inches in length, grow two in a bundle, and fall the second and third years. Large and well-formed trunks attain a height of from eighty to 100 feet and a diameter from two to nearly three. It reaches its best development in northwestern Florida, and its light, symmetrical trunks have long been in use there as masts for small vessels. It is too scarce to attract much attention from lumbermen, but they are well acquainted with its good qualities, and some of them take pains to keep the lumber separate from associated pines, and sell it to manufacturers of doors and interior finish. The bark bears considerable resemblance to spruce, which probably accounts for the name of the tree.
TABLE MOUNTAIN PINE (_Pinus pungens_). The French botanist, Michaux the younger, has been criticized for the statement which he made more than a hundred years ago that this species was confined to a certain flat-topped mountain in the southern Appalachian ranges, and he called it table mountain pine. It lacked much of being confined within the narrow limits where it was discovered. It grows in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. Its other names are prickly pine, hickory pine, and southern mountain pine. It supplies timber in all parts of its range, but, except in very restricted localities, it is not abundant. The lumber in the market is seldom distinguished from other pines, but some of the Tennessee mills sell it separately to local customers. The wood is medium light, rather strong (about like _Pinus rigida_, or pitch pine, which it resembles in other respects), is less stiff than white pine, and is resinous. The thick sapwood is nearly white, the heartwood brown. It is not a durable timber in contact with the ground. Its fuel value is low. Its needles grow in clusters of two, and are generally less than two inches long. The cones which are in clusters of from three to eight, and from two to three and a half inches long, are armed with stout, curved hooks. The cones shed their seeds irregularly during two or three years, and sometimes hang on the trees for twenty years. In open ground this pine occasionally produces fertile seeds when only a few feet high. Its forest form and open-ground form are quite different. In thick woods the tree is tall, with good bole, but in open ground it is only twenty or thirty feet high, and is covered with limbs almost to the ground.