“Prune a conifer?” you ask. Well, as Dylan Thomas said, we need “to begin at the beginning.” Conifers are cone-bearing trees that produce tiny pollen cones in spring followed later by more substantial ...

In much of the country, much of the landscape goes barren from fall through spring. Evergreens are typically the workhorse plants that carry us through. But not all evergreens are created equal. A ...

Female (left) and male spruce cones at the Arnold Arboretum. It's a more common sight to see separate male and female cones like this. (Courtesy William "Ned" Friedman) Every spring the conifer trees ...

MY YARD IS FULL of eastern white pine trees, and every three years or so, it is full of pine cones. This is one of those years. Pine cones have fallen all over the yard, the sidewalk, the driveway.

The pine cone was so huge that as I passed a garage sale near home, I could see it from the road. And I knew I had to have it. Best of all, this wasn’t really a sale, rather a large pile of items no ...

Last summer, I regularly passed a stand of towering white pine trees at Camp Plymouth State Park in Ludlow, where I live and work. Most days, I saw at least one hairy woodpecker, a few blue jays, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- A new study offers not only a sweeping analysis of how pollination has evolved among conifers but also an illustration of how evolution -- far from being a ...

Newly unearthed, surprisingly well-preserved conifer fossils from Patagonia, Argentina, show that an endangered and celebrated group of tropical West Pacific trees has roots in the ancient ...