Canary Island Pine (Pinus canariensis), seedlings, with the last frame showing one of the parent trees. Exotic pines are a definitive character element of many of Victoria’s post-invasion cultural landscapes, having been brought here through imperial and transpacific gold rush circuits of trade and botanical exchange in the decades immediately after settlement. Once available, they were widely employed as ornamental specimens in both residential and civic gardens, as windbreak and boundary shelter trees for fields, pasturage and orchards, and as erosion and dust control plantings for infrastructural earthworks. Most imported pine species were brought from fairly similar home climates and have the potential to successfully generate new generations from seed where conditions are supportive. In ornamental or shelter cultivation, their volunteers are easily controlled by manual means, however the trees’ use in forestry plantations has turned certain species, particularly P. radiata, into significant invaders of adjacent native forests. The P. canariensis seedlings pictured are establishing within a ‘novel’ succulent woodland on the Jolimont railway embankment in East Melbourne.
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