The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Pinus thunbergii
Also called Black Pine, Thunberg Pine
Japanese black pine is a large, hardy conifer from coastal Japan and Korea, widely grown as a garden tree and classic bonsai subject. It thrives in full sun, open sites and well-drained soil, and tolerates salt wind.
Pinus thunbergii (syn. Pinus thunbergiana), the Japanese black pine, is a species of conifer in the family Pinaceae, a pine native to coastal areas of Japan (Kyūshū, Shikoku and Honshū) and South Korea.
It is called kuromatsu (黒松) in Japanese, gomsol (곰솔) in Korean, and hēisōng (黑松) in Chinese.
It occasionally hybridises with the related Pinus densiflora (Japanese red pine); the hybrid has been named Pinus × densithunbergii by the Japanese botanist Homiki Uyeki.
In Japan it is widely used as a garden tree, both untrained growing as an overstorey tree, and trained as niwaki. The trunks and branches are trained from a young age to be elegant and interesting to view. It is one of the classic bonsai subjects, requiring great patience over many years to train properly.
Rocky Mountains Bristlecone Pine · Arizona Pine · Chinese White Pine · Mexican White Pine · Jack pine · Turkish Pine · Lacebark Pine · Canary Islands Pine · Caribbean pine · Swiss Pine · Mexican Pinyon · Sand Pine
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Pinus thunbergii by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
