Austrian Pine

• Long, stiff dark-green needles in pairs
• Dense, dark pyramid becoming flat-topped with age
• Rough gray-brown plated bark
• Egg-shaped cones

Native range

Native to southern Europe and Asia Minor, and planted throughout Kansas for windbreaks, screens, and yard specimens for most of the twentieth century. Pine wilt has since removed thousands of them.

Soil

Needs well-drained soil and tolerates alkaline, dry, and rocky sites. It will not tolerate saturated ground.

Sunlight

Full sun

Drought & heat

High drought tolerance, high heat tolerance.

A pine that browns from the top down in late summer and dies by winter is the classic pine-wilt pattern — remove and destroy the wood before beetles fly in spring. For new evergreens, diversify beyond two-needle pines.

Deep and wind-firm; no meaningful threat to structures or paving.

Good. Strong wood and a dense, well-anchored form handle Kansas wind and ice well.

Overall storm resistance: Good. Assessing damage after a storm

• Pine wilt

  Serious

  A nematode carried by the pine sawyer beetle, fatal to Austrian and Scots pine and often killing a mature tree within a single season. Needles turn gray-green then brown while staying attached. There is no cure once infected — the priority is removing and destroying the wood before spring.

• Diplodia tip blight

  Manageable

  New candles die back with stunted, browned needles, worst on the lower crown and on stressed trees. Prune out infected tips in dry weather.

• Dothistroma needle blight

  Manageable

  Brown bands with yellow halos across the needles, causing lower branches to shed needles and thin from the bottom up.

Seeing something not listed here? Work from the symptom instead

Best windowLate winter or early spring, before the new candles elongate

Minimal, and mostly limited to removing dead or damaged branches. Like cedar, pine will not resprout from needleless wood — cut back into bare stems and the gap is permanent.

Fine near a home as a screen or specimen. The real caution is diversification: after decades of pine wilt losses, planting a row of two-needle pines is a bet worth avoiding.

• Pine wilt confirmed — remove and destroy or chip the wood before the following spring so the beetle vector cannot emerge from it
• The tree browns from the top down over a single late summer, which is the classic pine wilt pattern

Removal is a judgment call about risk, not a formula. A tree with one of these conditions over open lawn is a very different situation from the same tree over a driveway — and that judgment needs someone on site.