← All plantsWhite pine
Pinus strobus
Also: Eastern white pine, Weymouth pine
WarmingDryingTonifying
Clears a phlegmy chest and seals small wounds with its resin.
A tall, soft-looking pine with long, flexible needles in bundles of five and slender cones streaked with resin. White pine warms the lungs and moves phlegm, carries vitamin C through the winter, and its resin disinfects and protects small wounds.
- Energetics
- Warming, drying, toning
- Taste
- Aromatic, resinous, faintly lemony
- Family
- Pinaceae (pine family)
- Parts used
- Needles and resin
Medicinal uses 5
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TTraditional useLLab and mechanism studiesCClinical studies
Warms the chest and brings up phlegm in chest colds and bronchitis; the aromatic oils work as you breathe the steam.
Rich in vitamin C, with antimicrobial oils, it makes a good daily tea through cold and flu season.
Pine resin salve disinfects small wounds and speeds their healing.
In mouthwashes, firms inflamed and receding gums.
Its bright resinous scent lifts the spirits, the same scent that fills the air on a walk through pines.
Preparations
Fresh needle tea and steams, needle tincture, and resin salve.
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Cautions
- Know your tree. White pine's soft needles come in bundles of five. Yew, with flat single needles and red berries, is deadly, and the needles of some western pines cause miscarriage in cattle.
- Some people react to pine resin (colophony) with a rash; patch-test the salve first.
- Cover a resin-dressed wound with a clean bandage. Deep or dirty wounds need medical care.
Pregnancy & breastfeeding
PregnancyAsk your practitioner
Pine needle tea is an old winter drink, but pregnancy has not been studied, and some pines cause miscarriage in cattle. Check with your midwife before drinking it; resin salve on the skin is the simpler choice.
BreastfeedingOccasional tea
Nursing data are limited; an occasional cup is a long-standing winter use.
Folklore
In the winter of 1535, Jacques Cartier's crew, iced in on the St. Lawrence and dying of scurvy, recovered on a tea of evergreen bark and needles shown to them by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians; the tree, annedda, may have been white pine or white cedar. In colonial New England the tallest white pines were marked with the king's broad arrow and reserved for Royal Navy masts, a grievance that boiled over in New Hampshire's Pine Tree Riot of 1772. It is the only five-needled pine native east of the Rockies.
How to grow
A fast-growing tree for sun or light shade and moist, well-drained, acid soil, reaching 80 feet or more. Gather needles year-round from low branches. Take resin only from old drips beside healed wounds in the bark, and leave the layer that seals the tree's wound in place.
In the wild
Eastern North America, from Newfoundland and Manitoba through the Great Lakes and New England and south along the Appalachians to Georgia. It once formed vast old-growth forests, most of them logged in the 1800s.
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