Photo: Tigerente at German Wikipedia — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 3 through 7
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Swiss stone pine seeds are small (8–12 mm) but rich and nutty — harvested regionally in the Alps for confectionery and liqueurs (notably in South Tyrol) rather than sold internationally as a commodity nut the way the related Italian stone pine is.
- Hardiness
- Zone 3–7
- Habit
- Tree
- Edible part
- Nut
- Ripens
- Autumn (cones)
- Mature size
- Tree 20–25 m, narrow-crowned and very slow — not containerable for cropping
- Light
- Full sun — cone/seed set needs sun
- Soil pH
- 5.0–7.0
- Environment
- Subalpine
- Native range
- Alps and Carpathian Mountains of central Europe — Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine and Romania — typically at 1,200–2,300 m.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- ~12 yrs when cultivated; 50+ yrs (up to 80 on harsh sites) in the wild, with peak seed production between 50–100 yrs.
- Growth speed
- Very slow — roughly 15–30 cm/year in height, only about 1.3 m in the first 30 years.
- Spacing
- 600 cm (236 in) apart — about 36 m² (388 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Needles in fascicles of five with a deciduous sheath, dark green, densely packed on the shoots.
- Root system
- A deep taproot from the first year, later joined by wide laterals near the surface — the combination that lets these pines hold rocky, droughty ground where little else will. The taproot is also why container-grown plants must go out young: a spiralled root never recovers.
- Fruit description
- Cones are 4–8 cm long, purple-brown, and take two years to mature; they don't open on the tree, so nutcrackers and squirrels extract the wingless, 8–12 mm seeds, which have a soft, easily chewed shell and a sweet, resinous flavor.
- Propagation
- By seed, with a hard seed coat that benefits from about 60 days of warm stratification followed by 90–120 days of cold, moist stratification (or simply 3–6 months cold stratification); named ornamental forms are grafted.
- Pollination
- Monoecious, wind-pollinated — plant more than one
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. Prefers poor, well-drained mountain soils and needs no routine feeding in the ground; establishing a mycorrhizal partner (inoculum from an existing pine or spruce stand) helps far more than fertilizer.
Growing tips. Extremely slow-growing — it can take about 30 years to reach just 1.3 m — but ultimately reaches 25–35 m with a trunk to 1.5 m. In the wild, cone-bearing doesn't start until around age 50 (up to 80 on harsh sites); cultivated trees can begin around 12 years old. Very resistant to white pine blister rust, and hardy to about -50°C.
Grow journal
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