THE PERENNIAL SEED OF THE CONIFER
Michalis 'BIG Mike' Kotzakolios


Defined Tag: Perennial Seed.

So far, it seems that the oldest living thing on the entire planet is a wild conifer - which is our favorite pine tree. This tree is in fact a bristlecone pine and it's about four thousand, nine hundred years old. Other bristlecone pines reside in the mountain regions from California to Colorado and can grow to fifty feet or remain the height of a typical shrub. But did you know that a pine cone is actually a perennial seed? And that you can identify a pine tree by its cone? You may have wondered about the different kind of pine trees available while you were shopping for a Christmas tree. Or perhaps while you were shopping for a specific perennial seed to stock a wooded area of property with. By studying a few characteristics of a pine tree's perennial seed, you can easily determine which of the major groups it belongs to.

Knowing what kind of pine that a particular tree belongs to is particularly helpful for those who sell pines (Christmas tree lots, store garden centers, etc.), for those who work with wood and wood products (lumberjacks, furniture salespersons, the paper industry, etc.) and for those who work to study and/or preserve nature (ecologists, forest preservationists, etc.). Each pine has its own characteristic that will affect its use by animals in nature, and of course, humans. Fortunately, each pine and its characteristics (wood density, weight, strength, splintering, resin, aroma, etc.) can be determined by examining its perennial seed.

And just like perennial flowering plants produce seeds in flowers, pine trees produce perennial seeds in cones. Both plants, the pine and the flower, use these seeds to reproduce. Flowering plants protect their seeds with an ovary, but pines (conifers) protect their seeds with the scales of their cones. Most cones of perennial seed plants bear brown scales, however some have the appearance of bluish or purplish white berries. One type of pine that has this type of perennial seed is the juniper pine or shrub. Junipers are found all throughout North America and the oils that these plants produce are used to make some medicines and perfumes.

With the hard, brown, scaly type, most pines bear small - one inch cylindrical shaped male cones in clusters near the bottom, and spirally shaped female cones (commonly referred to as pine cones) near the top. In other pines however, both the male and female perennial seed (cone) are located one branch.

The catalogs of perennial seed-dealers are an excellent resource for identifying different plants and trees, and they often describe (in detail) the type of plants available, the groups that they belong to, and instructions for planting and growing them.

BIG Mike is a well known author, developer and Adsense expert as well as the owner of Niche Maniacs - a unique Adsense Marketing System designed to build long-term passive income streams from Adsense, YPN, Chitika and other PPC services.