The Queen of the Alps

Climbing in the Eastern Alps, you notice at some point that the forest is thinning. The spruces fall behind, the larches stand alone, and then there are only them: stone pines, broad, often shaped by the wind, some with a split trunk where lightning struck and the tree simply went on growing. Above them, hardly any tree grows. It is no accident that the stone pine is called the Queen of the Alps.

In short: The Alpine stone pine (Pinus cembra), also known as Arve or Swiss stone pine, is a conifer of the high mountains of the Alps and Carpathians. It grows up to the tree line, withstands extreme cold, lives for several hundred and in rare cases more than a thousand years, and can be recognised by its needles in bundles of five. Its wood is light, durable and keeps its scent for a long time, and its seeds are spread mainly by a bird, the spotted nutcracker.

How do you recognise the stone pine?

Most reliably by its needles. On the stone pine they sit in bundles of five, blue-green, four to eight centimetres long. No other native pine has this: the mountain pine, which often grows nearby, carries its needles in pairs. Young stone pines have smooth, almost glossy bark that grows darker and more furrowed over the years.

Its cones are a test of patience in themselves. The stone pine flowers in early summer, but its cones only ripen in the autumn of the following year. It bears a good crop only every few years, in so-called mast years. The seeds inside have no wings, so the wind cannot carry them away. They are edible and are gathered as stone pine nuts.

Incidentally, the German name for the pineal gland, Zirbeldrüse, comes from the shape of these cones. The word is a loan translation from Greek, where the gland was named after the cone.

How the stone pine survived the Ice Age

That the stone pine grows almost only high up today is a comparatively recent development. During the last glacial period, when the Alps lay under ice, it grew far below in the foothills, for example in the Vienna Basin and on the Great Hungarian Plain. Only as it grew warmer did it follow the cold up the mountains, to where it stands today. You could say the tree line is its refuge in a warm age.

How exactly this migration happened was reconstructed in 2023 in the Journal of Biogeography by a research team led by Felix Gugerli of the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, using the DNA of present-day trees and pollen from old deposits. According to their work, the stone pine survived the glacial period mainly in areas south of the Alps and near the Carpathians. Its populations are still divided today into a western and an eastern lineage, which probably separated around 210,000 years ago. The boundary between them runs roughly along the Brenner Pass, exactly where many Alpine flowering plants also reach the limit of their range.

A stone pine in Salzburg or Tyrol thus carries a piece of Ice Age history within it that you cannot see from the outside.

The spotted nutcracker: a bird as gardener

Because its seeds have no wings, the stone pine depends on help. It comes from the spotted nutcracker, a speckled member of the crow family that you often hear at the tree line in late summer before you see it.

In autumn it picks the seeds out of the cones and carries them off in a throat pouch, up to around 70 at a time. It hides them in the ground in small portions of five to two dozen seeds, as a store for the winter. In this way a single bird caches tens of thousands of seeds in a year: according to studies around 47,000 in a poor year and around 109,000 in a good one, some up to 15 kilometres from the tree.

Its memory is remarkable. It is thought to find around 80 per cent of its caches again, and still about three quarters even under half a metre of snow. From the rest, which it forgets or no longer needs, new stone pines grow. Many stone pines at the tree line therefore owe their existence to a bird that forgot something.

Wood, parlours and cone gatherers

Stone pine wood has unusual properties. It is the lightest native softwood, shrinks less than any other as it dries, and therefore hardly cracks or warps. At the same time, alongside larch, it is one of the most durable native softwoods. One reason is its high content of natural compounds, including up to 0.5 per cent pinosylvin, a substance that fungi and bacteria cannot tolerate. The same compounds are why the wood keeps its scent for so long.

In the Alps it was used to build whatever was meant to last: wall panelling, entire parlours, chests, beds, carvings and tools. Freshly cut, the wood is almost white; over time it turns honey-coloured, while the reddish-brown knots stay firmly set.

The cones had their value too. In 19th-century Tyrol there were dedicated cone gatherers, the Zirmner, who climbed into the stone pine forests in the second half of September, when the nuts were ripe. The folklorist Ludwig von Hörmann described them in 1877 in his “Tiroler Volkstypen”. Not always to the benefit of the trees: too much gathering, the demand for wood from mining and saltworks, and clearing for alpine pastures pushed the stone pine back over the centuries into hard-to-reach places.

Today it is a comparatively rare tree in Austria. According to the Austrian Forest Inventory, in 2007 to 2009 it made up only around 0.4 per cent of the total timber stock, a good third of it in Tyrol.

Protective forest at the tree line

Where the stone pine stands, it has a task that you only truly understand in winter. Its roots anchor themselves in stony soil and rock crevices, and well-tended stone pine forests above about 1,800 metres protect the villages below from avalanches and mudslides for good. In the Alps such forests are called Bannwälder, protected forests.

As a pioneer, the stone pine also colonises old rockfalls where little else grows. That is why it is planted today in high places where the forest is meant to offer protection. Slowly, like everything about this tree: it takes decades before a young stone pine truly holds a slope.

Stone pine in perfume

Anyone who knows stone pine from a stone pine pillow or a parlour often expects exactly that smell in a perfume. It is not quite that simple. Not all stone pine scent is the same: oil from the needles smells greener and fresher, oil from the heartwood warmer, more resinous and deeper. And in a perfume the stone pine never stands alone but together with other notes that strengthen it, play around it or carry it further.

Both our fragrances begin with stone pine oil from the heartwood, from the Pitztal valley in Tyrol. The valley is closely tied to the tree; the village of Jerzens even dedicates an exhibition to it. A figure from there shows how precious the oil is: a distillery in the Pitztal obtains about one litre of oil from around one tonne of chipped stone pine wood.

In ARVE Chaleureux the stone pine meets cinnamon bark and lavender, in ARVE Pétillant lemon and pink pepper. It opens both fragrances and lingers for a while before other notes take over.

What remains

You can walk past a stone pine without noticing it. But once you know that this tree may already have been standing when the first farmsteads were built down in the valley, that a bird planted it and that its wood keeps its scent long after it is felled, you see it differently. Perhaps that is what is meant by queen: not splendour, but constancy.

How a fragrance with stone pine changes over the day, and how best to wear it, you can read in How to wear perfume.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the stone pine called the “Queen of the Alps”? Because it grows higher than almost any other tree in the Alps, withstands extreme cold and can live for more than a thousand years. The name stands for its constancy at the tree line.

What is the difference between Zirbe and Arve? There is none. Arve is another name for the same tree, Pinus cembra, used mainly in Switzerland. In Austria it is usually called Zirbe, in Tyrol also Zirm.

How old can a stone pine get? Most stone pines live for 200 to 400 years. Individual trees reach around 1,200 years.

How high does the stone pine grow? In the Eastern Alps mostly up to around 2,500 metres, in Valais occasionally up to 2,800 metres. It often grows right up to the tree line.

How do you recognise a stone pine? By its needles: they sit in bundles of five. No other native pine has this.

Who spreads the seeds of the stone pine? Mainly the spotted nutcracker. It hides the wingless seeds in the ground as a winter store. New trees grow from the caches it does not find again.

Why does stone pine wood keep its scent for so long? Because it contains many natural compounds, including resins and pinosylvin. They protect the wood from fungi and bacteria and are also responsible for its long-lasting scent.

What does stone pine smell like in a perfume? Oil from the heartwood smells warm, resinous and woody, oil from the needles greener and fresher. In a perfume the stone pine is always combined with other notes and therefore smells different from a stone pine pillow.

Note: The stone pine oil in our fragrances and in our pure stone pine oil comes from the Pitztal valley in Tyrol and is obtained from the heartwood of the stone pine.