Often they are mistaken for each other. Both have longer needles than the rest of the pine trees. In spring, it has brownish flowers on the branch tips. The two to three inch cones are clustered and contain brown, flat winged seeds that take four years to open and release. This is a short needle pine with two to three and a half inch green needles that are soft and flexible and in bundles of two.
Older trees have single trunks with brown bark.
The bark on younger trees is gray to reddish and is smooth. The sand pine closely resembles the spruce pine. Both have smooth branchlets when young and both have bark that is grayish and smooth. The sand pine is found naturally in deep coastal stands and inland dune ridges. It grows in sandy, well drained soils to a height of 100 feet.