When to plant pine trees?
- Botanical name
- Pinus sylvestris
- Family
- Pinaceae
Pine trees are planted from October to April.
Pine trees are woody perennials.
The pine has a single leading shoot and is therefore neither shortened nor shaped. A wound in old wood stays open, because no new branch comes from it. Only a dry or broken branch is sawn off.
The spacing of 9 metres is the distance at planting, and a grown crown is wider still. Between young trees it therefore looks like too much room.
A pine keeps its needles all winter. Water goes on escaping through them while the tree is not growing, so the roots must already be established when the cold comes. Autumn and spring both give that time.
Pine trees through the year
- planting
In short
Growing conditions
Are pine trees toxic to cats and dogs?
No. Pine trees are not toxic to cats and dogs.
Pests and diseases
Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.
- Signs
- Colonies of small aphids sit on the shoot tips and the underside of the leaves. The leaf curls and puckers, and sticky honeydew is left on everything below. The viruses they carry are more dangerous than the feeding itself.
- Prevention
- Go easy on nitrogen, because soft sappy growth is what aphids are looking for. Encourage the predators (ladybirds, lacewings, parasitic wasps). Use a reflective mulch, which puts them off settling, and a strong jet of water to knock the colony off the tips.
- What to do
- Potassium soap works on contact and only while it is wet, so it has to reach the underside of the leaf. On drought-loving plants and in heat it can scorch, so apply it in the evening.
- Signs
- The plant dies suddenly, often in mid season and without any decline beforehand. Peel the bark at ground level and under it there is a white or cream sheet of fungal tissue, thin as the skin of a mushroom. In the soil there are black or brown strands like bootlaces. In late summer and autumn tufts of honey brown mushrooms with a whitish ring on the stalk appear by the stumps or over dead roots.
- Prevention
- The fungus spreads through the soil with its strands, from a few centimetres to a good hand's width below the surface, and infects the roots of a living plant when it touches them. So do not leave stumps and dead roots in the ground. No plant is completely resistant, but privet, lilac, viburnum, weigela, forsythia, butterfly bush, rhododendron, thuja and walnut are particularly susceptible.
- What to do
- There are no products. The only thing that works is digging out and removing every infected root and stump, which takes away the food without which the strands in the soil do not grow. A vertical barrier of rubber or thick plastic sheet, buried about half a metre deep and standing a few centimetres above ground, stops the spread into an unaffected part of the garden.
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Related plants
The plants below are in the same botanical family (Pinaceae).
Sources about the plant: GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, Minnesota Poison Control System, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Oregon State University, Royal Horticultural Society, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 28 August 2026. The problem descriptions also draw on: Clemson Cooperative Extension, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, Utah State University Extension.