Distribution. Long Island (near Northport), and Staten Island, New York, and southern Pennsylvania to northern Florida, and westward through the Gulf states to eastern Texas, through Arkansas to southwestern Oklahoma (near Page, Leflore County, _G. W. Stevens_) and to southern Missouri and southwestern Illinois and to eastern Tennessee and western West Virginia; most abundant and of its largest size west of the Mississippi River.
24. Pinus virginiana Mill. Jersey Pine. Scrub Pine.
Leaves in remote clusters, stout, gray-green, 1½′—3′ long, marked by many rows of minute stomata, gradually and irregularly deciduous during their third and fourth years. Flowers: male in crowded clusters, orange-brown; female on opposite spreading peduncles near the middle of the shoots of the year, generally a little below and alternate with 1 or 2 lateral branchlets, pale green, 2′—3′ long, the scale-tips tinged with rose color. Fruit ovoid-conic, often reflexed, dark red-brown and lustrous, with thin nearly flat scales, and stout or slender persistent prickles, opening in the autumn and slowly shedding their seeds, turning dark reddish brown and remaining on the branches for three or four years; seeds nearly oval, full and rounded, ¼′ long, with a thin pale brown rough shell, their wings broadest at the middle, ⅓′ long, about ⅛′ wide.
A tree, usually 30°—40° high, with a short trunk rarely more than 18′ in diameter, long horizontal or pendulous branches in remote whorls forming a broad open often flat-topped pyramid, and slender tough flexible branchlets at first pale green or green tinged with purple and covered with a glaucous bloom, becoming purple and later light gray-brown; toward the western limits of its range a tree frequently 100° tall, with a trunk 2½°—3° in diameter. Bark of the trunk ¼′—½′ thick, broken by shallow fissures into flat plate-like scales separating on the surface into thin closely appressed dark brown scales tinged with red. Wood light, soft, not strong, brittle, coarse-grained, durable in contact with the soil, light orange color, with thick nearly white sapwood; often used for fuel and occasionally manufactured into lumber.
Distribution. Middle and southern New Jersey; Plymouth, Luzerne County, and central, southern and western Pennsylvania to Columbia County, Georgia, Dallas County, Alabama (near Selma, _T. G. Harbison_), and to the hills of northeastern Mississippi (Bear Creek near its junction with the Tennessee River, _E. N. Lowe_), through eastern and middle Tennessee to western Kentucky and to southeastern and southern (Scioto County) Ohio, and southern Indiana; usually small in the Atlantic states and only on light sandy soil, spreading rapidly over exhausted fields; of its largest size west of the Alleghany Mountains on the low hills of southern Indiana.