Jersey or Scrub Pine Tree
The Jersey Or Scrub Pine (P. Virginiana, Mill.) is another of those unfortunate trees whose lot seems to be to extort a meagre and miserable living out of worthless soil. A tortuous low tree, pendulous and discouraged looking, with grey-green leaves, that are yellowish as they first appear, stubby, t to 3 inches long, in clusters of twos. This is the tree of the Jersey pine barrens-the tree that clothes these waste places and gets little credit for it.Peter Kalm observed that cattle, in the heat of the day, choose the shade of this tree rather than of any other, though its foliage be much thicker. He judges that this strange choice arises " from the gratefulness of the fragrance " of this tree. Another author comments on the delightful fragrance exhaled by the exuding balsam of the despised Jersey pine. The opportunity to point a moral here is almost irresistible. But I stay my pointer. The range of P. virginiana is wide; from Long Island to Georgia and Alabama, and west to Indiana, where it rises to the height of too feet Its average height is one-third of this maximum limit, with a trunk diameter rarely over 18 inches.
The wood has been locally used for making tar, and for pump logs, water pipes, for fencing and fuel. It is not an economic tree, unless considered so in its work of covering quickly large areas of sterile soils in the Eastern States.