Information relating to conifers in general is included here; not all the entries necessarily refer to Scots pine 

1. I’m nearly 75.  When I was a very young baby in my first winter (I was born in November) I caught whooping cough.  My mother told me  she used to push me in my pram into a pine wood nearby.  This likely to have been Mousehold Heath [Norfolk] as we lived nearby then and it is now a nature reserve.  The clean air in the conifer woods was thought to be beneficial to chest complaints [e-mail, August 2023].

2. As children [c. 1960] our Welsh aunty told us that you could tell the weather with a fir cone or pine cone. When it was opened out the weather would be fine; if closed up it was about to rain. I’m not sure if this is true [Childwall, Liverpool, April 2013].

3. [North Hampshire. c.1940s] pine cones (always referred to as fir cones) gathered by the sackful for kindling (I still do this) [Orpington, Kent, February 2007].

Images:  main, planted, St Chad’s churchyard, Lichfield, Staffordshire, September 2014; inset, St Martha-on-the-Hill churchyard, Guildford, Surrey, December 2014.