White pine

Can you cut the points of the needles at White Pine?
I see that they also do that with other pine trees.

Greetings jeffrey

Do you want to cut them to make them shorter to better match the design of the tree? This is done in Japan by some, others consider it cheating. It will not hurt the tree.

It may however cause browning at the new tips of the needles. As Billy says, it's not in itself harmful to the tree but is unsightly. Where I have seen this done (and have done it myself on a couple of occasions) is immediately before a show so any browning that may occur is not visible during the event.

Thank you Billy and Fiona.

As above, yes you can - it lets light into small buds as well as making parts of the tree neat for a show or photograph. It is a good way to make strong branch tips weaker too, but plucking needles out is the best way to balance the strength, and very strict control of fertiliser plus letting the tree stay in the pot for 5-10 years will get needles much shorter. Most important the variety of white pine must be correct - there are lots of varieties of white pine - not many have neat, straight needles, some are curly, long, or yellow-green needles - grafted white pine species parviflora have shorter stiff straight blue/green needles but un-grafted pentaphylla white pines have bushy, longer and sometimes curly yellow/green needles. This has some usefull info White pine hints and the films are very good

cheers Marcus