I find it interesting that the city of New York has chosen for
its official Christmas tree a non-native specimen known to be
Europe’s tallest native tree, upwards of 200 feet, the Norway
spruce. Obviously the tree was grown in this country. Norway
spruces are the predominant tree of the famous Black Forest where
their long streamlined cones were used by cuckoo-clock-makers as
the models for the weights to power the clocks, hence the cone’s
nickname – the "cuckoo-clock cone."
It is thought that the origin of the word spruce is from
pruce, the Old English name for the kingdom of Prussia
from where many spruces were imported by other European countries
years ago. The Norway spruce is to many Europeans today
"the Christmas tree." In its favored environment it is
very frost-hardy, much more so than North America’s tallest
spruce, the Sitka spruce.
How we marveled at the world’s largest Sitka spruce on the
Olympic Peninsula in the state of Washington eight years ago.
Being 206 feet tall, it has a circumference of 56 feet – what an
imposing towering giant! How humbled we were to stand in its
presence. Sitka takes its name from the old Russian capital of
Alaska on Baranof Island off the southeast coast of Alaska.
Of the many species of spruces in the Northern Hemisphere,
including hundreds of cultivars, only two are native to
Wisconsin, the black and the white. One of the most beautiful of
all spruce cultivars, widely planted in landscaping today, is the
Colorado blue spruce, a pale blue form of the Colorado spruce,
Picea pungens.
In the case that you may be interested in nursing and
meticulously caring for what is possibly the most beautiful of
all conifers in the world, try a Brewer’s spruce, P.
brewerana. This absolutely gorgeous weeping spruce demands
moisture in the air as well as in the ground. Those of you living
near water may have luck with this slow-growing tree.
Getting back to our native black and white spruces, two
boyhood experiences helped to develop interest in and respect for
these trees. My dad, who was a tree-lover and grower par
excellence, planted a white spruce in the front yard of our new
home in about 1934. As young squirts we could easily jump over
it during our play, but not for long.
Apparently the soil, temperature, and moisture were just
perfect for its growth, about a foot and a half each year. We
soon learned to respect this spiny-needled tree, especially when
our game of tag or football in the front yard accidentally sent
us sailing into its lower branches. Ouch! Once was enough.
After that we learned to keep our distance.
My first introduction to black spruces was during my boyhood
in Kewaunee when some of our after-Sunday-school hikes with our
teacher, Wally Kacer, took us to the Seidel’s Lake bog southwest
of town. Wally knew trees well, and also taught us about
pitcher plants, sundews, a few wild orchids and sphagnum moss
during our further outings there. It was then that I became
fascinated with bogs, their incredibly interesting plants,
dragonflies, birds and other creatures, along with the fact that
rarely if ever would you find other people there.
The black spruce, Picea mariana (named after Maryland
where they do not naturally grow!) is the typical tree of cold
northern swamps – wet environments where trees grow. These hardy
conifers grow where others can’t, frequently in poorly-drained,
low wet pockets and in sphagnum moss. Eventually some black
spruce bogs appear like graveyards of gaunt upright skeletons.
Typically black spruces have narrow crowns that can be densely
bushy at the top. They often take on an uneven, unkempt
appearance owing to an accumulation of dead branches. It is not
uncommon for them to attain only a three-to-four-inch diameter in
100 years or more. One black spruce, having a two-inch-wide
trunk, that I cut out of a struggling patch of showy lady-slipper
orchids years ago was around 80 years old. In other words the
trunk of that tree grew outward one inch in 80 years.
By the way, I’ve heard the genus name of the spruce,
Picea, pronounced PIS-ee-a, py-SEE-a, and PICK-ee-a. I
prefer the latter, dating back to my boyhood days and from being
pushed into the extremely picky white spruce for the first time.
Travel northward on our continent and eventually you will
reach the most northern outpost of trees, black spruces, American
tamaracks and willows, all of dwarf size. The tamaracks and
willows are deciduous trees, losing their leaves and needles each
fall. However, the hardy little black spruce reigns as the real
champion of evergreens when it comes to braving and surviving the
most severe wet and cold climates.
Roy admires a gaunt black spruce in a favorite bog. The tree is 100 or more
years old.
This column appeared in the Door County Advocate
on 11/16/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Roy Lukes. All rights reserved.
