Winter discusses pine trees

Every Christmas season, humanity spends about $ 15 billion on Christmas shopping and decoration. Everywhere, "King" cannot be absent and is always the focal point in the year-end festive season, which is the brilliantly decorated green pine trees.

More remarkably, in terms of history or role in medicine and ecological balance, the green pine forests also occupy a particularly important position and deserve to be considered the most loved tree species. All Time.

More than 1,200 years ago, pine trees first appeared in Germany to commemorate the missionary's missionary merit. Over the centuries, this custom entered the United States through immigrant Germans. Today, the "Christmas industry " industry , including the pine tree business, accounts for nearly 20% of total retail sales each year in the US, helping create 100,000 seasonal jobs.

Picture 1 of Winter discusses pine trees
Pine trees are indispensable in every Christmas season.

The most expensive Christmas tree record is a pine tree with thousands of high-class crystal, colorful and worth more than 11 million USD at Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi. The highest Christmas tree was recognized by Guinness as a pine tree in Rio de Janeiro, erected in 2012. The pine tree is 85m high, weighs 542 tons and is lit by 3.1 million bulbs.

In Western countries, Christmas is considered the most important holiday of the year.Westerners only use pine green , decorated with many accessories. According to their conception, this natural green is "eternal" and represents prosperity and prosperity.

On average, each natural pine tree takes 7 years to grow and needs 15 years to reach a height of 7-8m. Therefore, in order to save and protect the environment, many countries encourage the use of plastic pine or create alternative symbolic models.

The world's largest natural pine tree lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, (USA) with 400 years of age. The tree is nearly 22m high and 33m wider. This pine tree was lit for the first time in 1928 with more than 5,000 bulbs.

And the tallest pine tree in the world is discovered in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the state of California, western America. This tree is 83.5m high with a trunk diameter of up to 31.3m. In particular, a Norwegian spruce (of the pine family), called Old Tjikko, is currently 9,550 years old and less than 5.4m tall. Old Tjikko is holding the record of plants that have the highest life expectancy on the planet that people have ever discovered.

Appears on the earth from the time of dinosaurs, pine loves the snowy ice regions. Resilient growth and adaptation in temperate, tropical and equatorial areas with 115 diverse species. The vast green pine forests cover the Northern Hemisphere, stretching from the frozen Alaska, to European countries on the old forests of the Alps, then to the countries of East Asia. It is no coincidence that pine trees rarely appear and focus on forests. The secret lies in the needle leaves with deodorizing properties and contains natural antibacterial substances. When dry leaves fall, they degrade the soil around the pine root, causing few other plants to survive.

Picture 2 of Winter discusses pine trees
And the tallest pine in the world is discovered in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, USA.

With supple properties, pine can grow well on many different types of soil such as acid sulfate soil, sandy soil, limestone or alluvial soil. Therefore, many countries around the world grow pine trees as watershed protection forests, to take advantage of their toughness. Pine is also the only plant on the earth that spreads cone cones. This is the advantage that this plant can dominate in icy lands, where flowering plants are difficult to survive.

The economic value of pine trees extends in many areas from food, construction materials to flavoring and medicinal materials. For some pine nuts with large seeds that do not contain harmful toxins, they cost an expensive price of $ 250-1,000 / kg because they contain many useful nutrients for the body such as protein, fat, vitamins A, B1, B2, C, D, E, calcium, phosphorus.

Fragrant pine wood, light and beautiful, so it is very popular in the construction industry around the world, bringing high commercial value to the US, New Zealand and Nordic countries, Finland and Norway. This wood has an average price of 90-150 USD / m3. Good pine woods like the US or Brazil can cost up to 280 USD / m 3 .

And few people know that amber, ie resin, when dry and coalesced into blocks, will play an absolutely important role with the strings. The artist who plays violin, cello, conterpass will not be able to pull out the standard sound sequence and or if not using amber to sharpen the guitar many times. The resin layer covered with the fretboard will create a smooth and accurate sound.

In terms of medicine, recently, researchers in Auckland (New Zealand) have extracted a substance from pine bark to help people with brain injury quickly improve their memory. In addition, pine oil obtained from distillation of leaves, young twigs and cones is also of high economic value. A large enterprise in the Canadian pharmaceutical industry is starting a project to plant and exploit red pine essential oil in Vietnam , because the concentration of concentrates in pine resin grown in the soil of Vietnam is many times higher than that of plastic. information of the same type in other countries. The selling price of this essential oil is up to 40,000 USD / liter.

Picture 3 of Winter discusses pine trees
Pine is fragrant, light and beautiful, so it is very popular in construction industry all over the world.

Currently, green pine oil is used as an aroma in bath oils, cleaning products or lubricants in small and expensive watch devices. It is also a natural deodorant and antibacterial agent. Some rare pine species such as Korean red pine are also extracted with essential oils and packaged in the form of oral medicines to support blood pressure, blood fat with a selling price of over 200 USD for 1 bottle of 100 tablets, or an essential oil liquid 35 USD / 100 ml.

In Vietnam, populations of 14 species are concentrated mainly in the Central Highlands provinces and the northern, coastal and Lam Dong provinces. However, in 2014 according to national forest inventory data, in less than 5 years Lam Dong lost about 90,000 ha of pine forest. Particularly in Da Lat, the forest coverage has decreased from 56% (2010) to only about 47% (2014). In particular, pine forest occupies a very large area.

Not all pine varieties have a distinctive dark green color. Spread along the border of North America and Canada, there are varieties of pine Tamarack with bright yellow leaves. In Lam Dong recently, thousands of green pine trees with age of 20-40 years have also turned yellow like that. But sadly, Thong Lam Dong changed color because thousands of trees were cut deep holes and filled with chemicals. In just one week, thousands of green pine forests have simultaneously withered gold.