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Survives zone 2 through 6
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Siberian dwarf pine is a low, shrubby, extremely cold-hardy species — its seeds are edible, oily and nutritious, but harvested only locally and casually in Siberia and Japan rather than traded commercially like its larger pine relatives.
- Hardiness
- Zone 2–6
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Nut
- Ripens
- Autumn (cones)
- Mature size
- Sprawling shrub 1–3 m tall, the prostrate stems spreading several metres — a dwarf pine, not a tree
- Light
- Full sun — cone/seed set needs sun
- Soil pH
- 5.0–7.0
- Environment
- Subarctic and alpine
- Native range
- Far eastern Siberia (east from the Yenisei River), Kamchatka, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Mongolia, northeastern China, the Korean Peninsula and Japan (Hokkaido south to central Honshu), typically above the treeline.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 10+ yrs
- Growth speed
- Very slow.
- Spacing
- 400 cm (157 in) apart — about 16 m² (172 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Needles in fascicles of five, 4–6 cm long.
- Root system
- Extensive, spreading root system suited to its prostrate habit; used in erosion control and revegetation on unstable alpine slopes.
- Fruit description
- Cones are small, 2.5–4.5 cm long, holding oily seeds up to about 10 x 7 mm with a soft texture and a mild, slightly resinous flavor — easier to hand-harvest than most pine nuts because the plant is low and shrubby rather than a tall tree.
- Propagation
- By seed; as a close relative of P. sibirica it is generally raised the same way, with cold stratification recommended before sowing. Named dwarf or blue-foliage selections (e.g. 'Glauca') are propagated by grafting.
- 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. Grows naturally in poor, thin alpine and subarctic soils and needs no routine feeding in the ground; tolerates nutritionally poor, sandy-to-loamy, mildly acid to neutral soil.
Growing tips. An exceptionally cold-hardy shrub, tolerating temperatures down to about -70°C, forming a sprawling, prostrate (krummholz) mat 1–3 m tall (exceptionally to 5 m) that spreads much wider via ground-hugging branches — a landscape/erosion-control shrub rather than a nut-crop tree, and very slow-growing.
Grow journal
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