Bosnian Pine Pinus heldreichii. Pirin Mountains, Bulgaria (41° 45' 30" N 23° 26' 10" W; tree and cone at 2100m, bark at 1930m altitude). September 2001. The species is noted for its dark purple immature cones, and the 'crocodile-skin' bark pattern on old trees; the bark here is of the tree 'Байкушева мура' ("Baikushev's pine", named after Kostadin Baikushev, the forester who first discovered the tree in 1897), 24m tall and 2.22m diameter in 2001, and widely reported in Bulgarian media to be 1,300 years old (though this age is unverified). It has a deservedly highly rating as a specimen tree in western gardens, with very neat conic growth as a young tree (evident in the photo here, despite the tree having been hit by an avalanche in the past). Although often labelled in as "Pinus leucodermis" or "Pinus heldreichii var. leucodermis", there is no scientific evidence to support this name as referring to a distinct taxon (R. Businský, 1989. Beitrag zur Taxonomie und Nomenklatur von Pinus heldreichii. Mitt. Deutsch. Dendrol. Ges. 79: 91-106; A. Farjon, 2005. Pines. Drawings and Descriptions of the genus Pinus. Second edition. Brill).
‘Green Industry Images’ Copyrighted Photograph; Permission Granted. Pinus leucodermis = Pinus heldreichii Erhardt, Walter - 'List of Conifer Names' (2005); ISBN: 3800148813
