This is what they should/could look like. These are old plantation grown loblollies in the very far western suburbs of DC. An area they are not native to...so the Morris really has no "climate excuse".

"Do most public arboreta give much thought --"

There's a clue of an answer right there. Maybe sometimes long in the past....

PS The loblolly grouping looks well-cared for.

Haha beng. Good point but it depends how public is defined: open to the public, or publicly funded? Morris is not - it's owned by the University of Pennsylvania which is a very well endowed Ivy League university. They also have a member's program for the Arboretum itself that brings in revenue, as well as hosting activities for which they charge a fee. If their on-site crews had just done the barest minimal work on this in the past several decades, it would surely look better. I can assure the golf course has hardly done anything to those loblollies in Virginia over the past 25 years. One almost has to wonder if they did work on it to make it look that bad! Was this the 'how not to prune a conifer' demostration tree? Or maybe it's "we hate that we have such a common southern tree in our collection, so we will make it look awful" tree bwhahaha.

mad-gallica, perhaps those white pines were "weeviled" in youth as many are and end up almost broadleaf-like forms like these in nearby state park.

davidrt, perhaps an interesting story on the loblolly theme, mine is the only tree I received (thru mail) from a fellow gardenwebber, salicaceae. He offered me a loblolly pine seedling from NW Arkansas, and I in exchange a montaine longleaf pine seedling from NE Alabama. My loblolly was slow to begin in very poor soil, but has grown faster in time and always has a second flush at the top, which has never been killed by winter cold. Needlecast-riddled ponderosa pine stump in foreground.

First example:

Lone tree growing in the open country.

Arboretum staff and changing of the guard never noticing the slow spreading of the tree.

Hence, the subject never came up.

Suddenly it's too late to prune in a healthy manner.

Second example:

Grove of trees located in close proximity to one another, competing for sun, possibly good sized before golf course came along and thinned them out to improve/change the fairway. Leaving the nicest specimens and removing brushy deformed specimens.

I see your points about the growth environments, Bill and mad_gallica (z5 Eastern NY) .

But the problem with that is I see plenty of loblollies in isolated plantings in all sorts of places, my own garden, elsewhere in my neighborhood, old farmsteads either side of the Ches. Bay - certain parts of NW Virginia near where the golf course picture was taken, where they were planted as specimens and not grown in plantations - MANY places where _lone_ loblollies were planted and look just fine! They pretty much get on autopilot and just grow correctly, most of the time.

(As with Beng's example, too! I don't think he did any specialized pruning to get that shape!)

As beng pointed out, the white pines can be weeviled, but I don't think the same can happen to the P. taeda? Correct?

So, again, I'm back to...how in the world did that poor thing end up with such an awful shape!

Fertilizer?