The hard pines are a group of needle-leaved evergreens, whose leaf
bundles contain two or three needles, as a rule. The wood is heavy,
usually dark in colour, and saturated with a resinous, gummy sap. The
common name, “pitch pine,” refers to the resinous wood; it is much harder
to work with than that of soft pines. The most valuable hard pine forests
grow in the Southern states. These are now the chief sources of pine
lumber in the Eastern half of the continent. They furnish also quantities
of turpentine, pitch, tar, and oil, products of the resinous sap which
saturates the wood of these trees while they are growing.
One trait of the pitch pines is that they retain the leaf sheath. The
soft pines shed the sheath as soon as the leaf bundle has attained its
full length.