Pine plantations began to be established in Australia from the 1870s as insurance against diminishing supplies of timber from native forests. Early attempts to find suitable pine plantation species for Australian conditions gave rise to planting trials using a wide variety of species. Pines from north and central America, Europe and the Mediterranean, from the Himalayas and Eastern Asia were all tried.

While several showed promise, the most successful was Monterey or radiata pine. This species grows naturally only in three small localities on the central Californian coast, in an area … Read more “Radiata pine – ‘super wood’ of the 21st century”