In an old ponderosa pine forest, the trunks are hard to miss: thick bark, yellow to orange-red, broken into broad plates with black cracks between them. Some people say a furrow of that bark smells of vanilla. Others smell nothing at all. Either way, the bark is what has kept these trees alive for centuries.
A tree made for fire
Ponderosa pine grows from southern Canada into Mexico, and from the Great Plains to the Pacific coast. Grown trees are commonly 27 to 40 metres tall, and they often live 300 to 600 years.
For most of that history, fire was a regular visitor. Low surface fires swept through most ponderosa forests every 5 to 20 years, keeping them open and park-like. A big tree's thick bark protects it from those fires. A seedling has no such armour, and fire easily kills it.
The needles are long, 15 to 24 centimetres in the Pacific form of the tree, and grow in bundles of three. The cones are 8 to 15 centimetres long, and their seeds feed mice, chipmunks, squirrels and many birds. Deer and elk shelter in the forest.
Back into burned ground
In July 2021 the Bootleg Fire burned 413,765 acres of southern Oregon, the third largest fire in the state since 1900. That is where Greenr Gifts trees in Oregon are planted, with American Forests. Our planting reports from there list ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, western larch, white fir and Douglas fir.
Ponderosa leads by far. Across the three Oregon plantings our trees have been part of, in May 2025 and April 2026, crews planted 129,162 seedlings, and 82,928 of them were ponderosa pine. That is about two in every three.
Seedlings are the stage fire kills most easily. The trees that get past it can live for 300 years or more.
More about ponderosa pine, or see the Oregon project.
Sources: USDA Forest Service, Silvics of North America, "Ponderosa Pine"; "Pinus ponderosa" and "Bootleg Fire", Wikipedia; Greenspark planting records for the Bootleg Fire recovery area (May 2025) and Boulder (April 2026). Top photo: Vlad & Marina Butsky, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
