ON THE TRAIL OF THE LEAN-SOME PINE
Cook’s pine () is a conifer native to New Caledonia in the Pacific islands but has been planted across the world as an ornamental species. Wherever it is found, though, it never seems to grow vertically. Matt Ritter, director at Cal Poly Plant Conservatory in California says, “When grown outside of its native range, this species has a pronounced lean so ubiquitous that it is often used as the identifying characteristic for the species.” Researching the pines, Ritter found that all the specimens he was studying seemedbut the lean became more pronounced with distance from the Equator, and that only nine per cent of trees did not have the predicted lean. The direction in which a plant grows is largely dependent on environmental factors like the direction of the sunlight, wind, surrounding vegetation and gravity, and Cook’s pines are the only plants so far discovered that consistently lean in a geographical direction. “The plants are responding to their global environment in a way not yet fully understood,” says Ritter.
