Pines

A brief and incomplete cultural history

Pine Trees by Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539–1610)

Oh Diane, I almost forgot. Got to find out what kind of trees these are. They’re really something.

Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

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In 2024 I wrote a “ brief and incomplete cultural history” of quail. I planned at the time to follow up with a similar piece. It’s taken a while, but here’s a new and incomplete cultural history. This time, it’s about the pine.

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Walking around my part of Tokyo, I don’t have to go far before finding a pine tree. Older houses will often have one at the entrance, often with a branch running across the top of the entrance. These are known as monkaburi no matsu (門被りの松, literally ‘gate-covering pine’.

I’ve written before of the three friends of pine, plum and bamboo. The pine represents longevity in Japanese culture. It’s evergreen and endures.

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Waiting for the gods

But there’s another connection to time. The Japanese word ‘matsu’ (松) for pine is an exact homophone for the etymologically unrelated ‘matsu’, meaning ‘to wait’ (待つ). This “sacred pun” connects to Shinto belief: that these trees are yorishiro, or places where the kami (gods and goddesses) descend to interact with the mortal realm. So the trees are places to wait for the gods.

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There’s a curious parallel with English. The noun “pine” is phonologically identical to the verb “pine”. And our pining for people and places can also involve waiting. Again, as with “matsu” in Japanese, there’s no etymological connection with the word for the tree, but the link is suggestive.

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And now as I look back, the solitary Scots pine that grew on the family farm in my childhood seemed to have been waiting – pining, even – for centuries.

But waiting for what?

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I love the traditional depiction of pines in Chinese painting and saw many examples of the genre when I lived in Shanghai.

Crooked pine by Wu Zhen, 1335.

Apart from being symbols of endurance and longevity, it seems there could also be a political dimension to such paintings. For Yuan-dynasty scholars living under the Mongols (1271 to 1368), depictions of ancient pines apparently became a metaphor for survival in the face of political discrimination.

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English poet Peter Levi in his Five Ages of a Poet (1978) was possibly inspired by Chinese painting when he invoked the image of

“... the young scholar under a pine tree

with the thin inward meaning of pine trees”

This delicate poem continues:

“Later the impure smells of the moon.

The heavy scratch of brushes on canvas

then the faint scratching of a charcoal twig

the infinitely silent fall of snow

then the light silence of the fallen snow,

the young scholar studies the pine tree.

Daybreak is perfect, a quiet brush

silently painting the sky with light.”

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Not long before Wu Zhen completed the beautiful painting of a pine tree shown above, Lady Nijō wrote one of the classics of Japanese literature, Towazugatari (C.1307) - literally “An Unasked-For Tale”. ¹

Here, pine trees appear in their guise as symbols of longevity:

The two ex-Emperors went to the new palace at Fushimi to plant pine tree seedlings. Lord Konoe was to have accompanied them but instead he sent a poem expressing the hope that the newly-planted pine trees might flourish for thousands of years to come,

May the young pine trees

Planted now at Fushimi

Live a thousand years

And flourish, together with

the palace of Fushimi.

The ex-Emperor replied with a poem also praying for the prosperity of the Fushimi palace,

For a thousand years

May the Fushimi palace

Flourish and prosper

As do the ancient pine trees

Standing upon the mountain.

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Classification

Pines sit within the larger conifer family, which includes firs, spruces, larches, cedars, junipers and yews.

Image source: Interactive tree explorer at OneZoom.org.

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Britain has only one pine (the Scots pine, like the one on the farm I grew up on) and just two other conifers – the yew and the juniper. The Scots pine is a source of timber and creator of a natural habitat for many other species. I associate yews, which are found in churchyards, with death. And junipers with gin, of course. But if we look at TS Eliot’s poetry, we find that junipers may have other meanings.

And yews seemed to have other meanings for Eliot, too. He ended his poem Dry Salvages (the third part of Four Quartets, published in 1941) with

We, content at the last

If our temporal reversion nourish

(Not too far from the yew-tree)

The life of significant soil.

And towards the end of Little Gidding the last part of his quartet, he observes, rather gnomically, that

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration.

My photo of a local “akamatsu” (アカマツ), Pinus densiflora, or red pine.

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The tiny number of native conifers and single species of pine are now outnumbered by the many imported pines and firs in Britain, mostly cultivated for their timber.

Thomas Hardy, an acute chronicler of the English countryside, captures the displacement of native species by cultivated cash crops in his poem, The Pine Planters (Marty South’s Reverie), which is linked to his novel, The Woodlanders (1887).

In the novel, Giles Winterborne notes that “there was a thousand young fir-trees to be planted in a neighbouring spot which had been cleared by the wood-cutters, and that he had arranged to plant them with his own hands.”

The planting of these firs (or rather pines, as indicated by the poem’s title) is the setting for Marty South’s Reverie.

The scene in the novel and poem seems quite unlike that in Lady Nijō’s Towazugatari quoted from above. For one thing, the physically demanding nature of the work is emphasised.

We work here together
In blast and breeze.

I think it’s unlikely that the ex-emperors in Nijō’s story would have experienced the ceremony as physical labour.

The two scenes are united in one way. They both stress the pine’s longevity. But while the scene in Towazugatari invokes the image of the pines living gloriously for a thousand years, Hardy’s poem inhabits a bleaker universe. Marty imagines the pines in their grief at having to grow and suffer the “storm and drought” of nature:

Thus, all unknowing

For whom or what

We set it growing

In this bleak spot,

It still will grieve here

Throughout its time,

Unable to leave here,

Or change its clime;

Or tell the story

Of us to-day

When, halt and hoary,

We pass away.

Marty folds the story of her and Giles (for whom she has an unrequited love). The grieving here is ostensibly done by the tree but surely also by Marty. The tree is “unable to leave here” – rather like Marty, as it turns out. Adult trees are, after all, sessile – and so, in effect, is Marty.

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The Pine Tree Riot.

In April 1772, the inhabitants of New Hampshire rioted against the British monarchy to protest the enforcement of the Broad Arrow Policy. This was a policy of the English government from 1691 to preserve tall trees in the American colonies, which were of critical use for the Royal Navy. It applied to Massachusetts from 1691 and was extended to New Hampshire in 1698.

A law was passed in 1722 but apparently it wasn’t strictly enforced until John Wentworth became governor of New Hampshire in 1766. It seems a rather barmy and authoritarian thing to do – a typical piece of authoritarian colonial rule.

I have to say I enjoyed Wikipedia’s summary card of the incident, especially the entries under “caused by” and “methods”.

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I’m going to end, as I did in my essay on quail, with Shakespeare. This gives me an excellent excuse to quote from Richard II, which contains some of the poet’s most beautiful dramatic verse.

In Act 3, having been warned that his rival Bolinboke is gathering forces against him, Richard launches into this wonderful passage of verse:

Discomfortable cousin! know’st thou not

That when the searching eye of heaven is hid,

Behind the globe, that lights the lower world,

Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen

In murders and in outrage, boldly here;

But when from under this terrestrial ball

He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines

And darts his light through every guilty hole,

Then murders, treasons and detested sins,

The cloak of night being pluck’d from off their backs,

Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves?

So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke,

Who all this while hath revell’d in the night

Whilst we were wandering with the antipodes,

Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,

His treasons will sit blushing in his face,

Not able to endure the sight of day,

But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.

Richard arrogantly and fatuously compares himself to the sun, cleansing the world of the traitor Bolingbroke (spoiler: he’s the future Henry IV).

But I find the image of that sun as it “fires the proud tops of the eastern pines“ to be simply wonderful.

And the choice of the trees may not be incidental: pines grow tall and straight – like his own (imagined) majesty.

Then in Act 5, Richard, now in custody and facing imprisonment and death, laments,

I toward the north,

Where shivering cold and sickness pines the clime;

My wife to France: from whence, set forth in pomp,

She came adorned hither like sweet May,

Sent back like Hallowmas or short’st of day.

Here we return to the other meaning of ‘pine’ mentioned above.

The word clearly no longer stands for the upright and sunlit tree he mentioned in his earlier glorious speech, dismissing Bolingbroke. The use of ‘pine’ here describes the huge change in Richard’s fortune and marks the passage from glorious sun king to sad prisoner, longing for better days on his way to his death.

It strikes me as remarkable how, through the changing use of this one word, ‘pine’, Shakespeare economically but powerfully traces the arc of his protagonist’s fate.

1. From Lady Nijo’s Own Story (p. 92), Tuttle, translated by Wilfred Whitehouse and Eizo Yanagisawa.

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PS

In case you’re wondering, Special Agent Cooper’s question at the top of this page receives an answer:

FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: Sheriff, what kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here? Big, majestic.

Sheriff Harry S. Truman: Douglas firs.

FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: [Marvelling] Douglas firs...