The Monterey Pine

I stand open to correction, but as far as I know the common old pine tree around Gembrook is Pinus radiata or the Monterey pine, indigenous to Nth America. There are Bhutan pines at the railway station and the odd baltic pine and Mexican pines in gardens but the common old pine tree is pinus radiata.
I counted them on my walk the other day. The driveway to the first house on the low side of Quinn Rd. has a row of 8 mature trees. I counted 18 young saplings along the roadside here, babies of that row. A little further on, on Launching Pl.Rd. there's a row of 18 along the front of a house where a front fence would normally be. Another hundred metres or so and there are 4 seriously large specimens in each corner of the block where the 'phsyco' house* stands, in the middle of these four dark giants. Then there's another couple on the other side of the road near the JW's. There's 8 or 9 big ones visible in the station woodland, one of which came down in the storm.
That's a lot of pine trees, just on my walking route, and they'll reward me shortly with pine mushrooms at their base. There's another four around the Catholic church in the main street. They remind me that a large specimen some years ago crashed down on the Uniting church in Ure Rd., totally destroying the building. Fortunately there was no congregation in the church at the time, the sinners spared. I'm trying to think of a God/Proddy joke but it would be in poor taste.
To me as a beekeeper, pine trees seemed a waste of space, having no value to foraging honeybees. Recently, I had a bee box, in the flat, posted to me by the equipment supplier. As I nailed the four sides together I noted that it was of course pine wood, being light, soft and easily nailed, resisting splitting.
On Easter Monday on my walk when I reached 'the gouge', a pair of plumbers were preparing to get to work so I went in to have a chat. They were suspicious of my cordiality at first, as if saying to themselves, "What's this dickhead want," but loosened up to answer my questions.
"The walls and roof trusses are pine. The decking joists are treated pine. It's all plantation grown timber. 90 percent of new houses are the same. We're putting batons up today, it's easy to screw into the pine."

'The International Book of Trees' says of the Monterey pine--

"The Monterey pine is perhaps the lushest and most lordly of the whole tribe. Nature had restricted this incredibly vigourous, but rather tender, plant to a few square miles around Monterey in southern California. Man has changed all that: it's now the chief forestry plant of the southern hemisphere. Results in New Zealand are sensational. In its 5th year there one tree put on 20 feet. Where it's happy the Monterey pine grows vast branches and keeps them densely clad in bright bottle green needles. Even in southern England it grows four feet a year, not even making a resting bud in winter but charging right on, only pausing in cold weather."

Pine needles make good smoker fuel too. Dense cool smoke, and they are convenient to bag. Against the morning or evening sky, pines have a strong, dark presence and their own stately beauty. My tree of the week.

* That house reminds me of the one in which Norman Bates lived in the move 'Phsyco'.