Botany: soft and hard pines

Self-tutoring about trees one encounters: the tutor mentions the organization of pines into soft and hard.

The following is by my understanding.

When I was a kid in the Annapolis Valley, we had a lot of pines. We also had maple and oak, etc. However, some prominent trees were pines.

In our front yard there, we had a grove of red pines that grew on a slope: each might have been sixty to eighty feet tall. Then, right on the border of the property, about a tree’s length from those red pines, was an eastern white pine.

That situation represents the two main classifications of pines: the white pine is what they call soft pine, while the red, hard pine.

Soft pines generally have needles in bundles of five, while hard, bundles of two to three.

In BC, the western white pine is a soft pine, while the lodgepole and ponderosa are examples of hard pine.

Source:

Brockman,C.F., Merrilees,R., Zim,H.S. (ed). (1968). Trees of North America. Western Publishing Company, Inc.

Jack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane, Campbell River, BC.