Today’s needles are those of Pinus sabiniana. The Audobon guide calls it “digger pine,” but when I looked it up online in search of a larger photo to work from, the common names that kept coming up were foothill pine, towani pine, or most often, gray pine. I thought the clue to the change was in the Audobon guide itself, which noted that “digger pine” came from the name given (by Europeans, one can infer) to the many Indian tribes of the west as a whole. Hm, sounds pejorative, and sure enough, the Jepson Manual of 1993 advises against it (see how much I’m learning? I knew next to nothing about California plants before this week, and now I am tossing around terms like “the Jepson Manual”). My Audobon guide was published in 1980: progress.
It seems fitting, therefore, to add here its common name in various Californian languages–which, contra those who lumped the tribes into one, are greatly varied. People of the Ohlone language group, the region in which I live, call it xirren or hireeni. Others known to Leanne Hinton (author of Flutes of fire :essays on California Indian languages. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books) are tujhalo (Achumawi), axyúsip (Karuk), sakky (Southern Sierra Miwok), gapga (Klamath), sakky (Chimariko), tunah (Mono), náyo (Wappo), c’ala’i (Yana), tuwa (Patwin) and, the one that has made its way into wider use, towáni (Maidu). Some of these languages are critically endangered or extinct, and with them, the lore embedded in these names. The nuts of pinus sabiniana are particularly good to eat, and several Californian languages have words specifically for the nut, and in one case different words for the ripe and unripe version.
On a lighter linguistic note, when I was a child, I thought “penis” was spelled “pinus,” so that seeing the scientific name of pine species still gives my inner six-year-old a giggle.
Unlike the previous two trees, the gray pine is native to California.
Sermons in Stones 
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January 3, 2022 at 8:43 pm
Karen Skold
I appreciated learning about a new native tree. Don’t know if I’ve ever seen one. Do you know where it grows? Also, I couldn’t tell from your drawing if the needles come in bunches of 2 or 3. It looks like 2, but I’m not sure. Why? Number of needles in a bunch is part of identifying types of pines. I hope you will draw more native plants.
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January 3, 2022 at 11:08 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
I’m going through the Audobon field guide to western trees in order, so some are native and some aren’t. It’s making me wonder how long trees have to have been growing here to be considered native. If they were introduced as far back as, say, the establishment of the Spanish missions, are they native? Or are those still “introduced” in botanical parlance? I’ll look that up one of these days.
This species’ needles come three to a bunch. From the photos, they look to me, as if their points of origination form roughly an equilateral triangle, so that the third is often obscured behind the front two. Also, two will cross and cluster together closely so that I am pretty sure we’re looking at two needles but they appear more like one broad one. So the geometry of their growth, plus the limits of my drawing skills, make the appearance of just two per cluster.
Here’s a map of their range.
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January 4, 2022 at 11:04 pm
Erp
There may be one still on the Stanford campus in Frost Amphitheater https://trees.stanford.edu/ENCYC/PINsab.htm
Sairus Patel who maintains the site also sometimes leads tree walks of the Stanford Campus.
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