In Touch: Torrey pines, the rarest pines in North America

In my garden, is it a native plant? Plus new science on these remarkable trees

At the zoo/aquarium where I work, we feature a native pollinator garden. Although the landscaping and plants of the garden don’t really differ much from the native landscaping of the rest of our grounds, the garden allows us to spotlight our pollinators and encourage folks to plant their own pollinator gardens.

In the garden is an outdoor classroom with a shade structure, and growing up through the timbers of the shade structure is a Torrey Pine. The tree predates the installation of the garden and the construction of the shade structure. It even predates me, having been planted long before I was hired at the organization.

The Torrey Pine after I pruned it. Native? Nonnative? Definitely rare. Photo by the author.

One of the branches of the pine started to droop, making it difficult for folks to sit in the shade; so I trimmed the branch and freed up the space. It was a quick, mundane task, but nonetheless a little odd, because Torrey pines are the rarest pine trees in North America, numbering just a few thousand. They only grow along the northern coast of San Diego County and two of the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. The rarest pine in North America, and I was chopping away at one of them.

Once you consider that I sawed a branch off a member of the subspecies Pinus torreyana ssp. torreanna, the subspecies whose small numbers—two to three thousand—occupy a bluff and some surrounding areas along San Diego County’s coast, it can seem even weirder.

If this tree had not been planted on this island where I work, It would not be growing here. They like the sandstone soil of coastal northern San Diego County. They also thrive on the thick fog banks that envelope that piece of geography. At the zoo/aquarium the soil is almost entirely made of clay, and we don’t get the thick fog, either. It’s remarkable that this tree was able to take root at all on this island.