The White Spruce tree (Picea glauca)

For this week's featured species, we're going to look at the White Spruce.  The proper Latin name for this species is Picea glauca.  White spruce is sometimes referred to as "Canadian spruce," although that's not an official name of any sort.


Some people refer to Engelmann spruce as white spruce, but that's a different species.  Engelmann spruce is found at elevation in southern BC at the western US.  Engelmann spruce is often crossed with true white spruce to create a hardy hybrid that is planted all over western Canada.

Here's a photo that I took of a white spruce, which I believe was probably about 30-40 years old:

The white spruce is a very plentiful tree.  It's very healthy, and has a broad range.  You can find this species all across Canada, except for the very southern reaches of BC and Alberta, and the west coast of BC (where Sitka spruce takes over).  Here's a range map from Wikipedia:

Spruce trees, in general, love water.  They typically prefer flowing (aerated) water, although black spruce can thrive in some pretty fetid swampy areas.  White spruce is certainly quite happy to grow in moisture-laden soils.  White spruce, like all other spruce trees, is also a very shade-tolerant tree.  However, it is slightly less shade tolerant than red spruce (red spruce is a common tree in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia).  Regardless, white spruce will do adequately when planted under a canopy, or in areas with high brush and vegetation competition.  However, white spruce seedlings can be susceptible to spring frosts.  Having brush or a mature canopy over young seedlings acts to protect them until they're older.

When I was very young, I thought that all cones, regardless of what species of conifer the cone came from, were called pine cones.  Of course, that was that naivete of a young child.  The cones on spruce trees are called spruce cones.  White spruce has two types of cones, male and female.  Each tree contains both types.  The male cones produce pollen, which floats to the female cones to fertilize the seed.  After the cones are fertilized, it takes about three months for them to mature and open.  When the cones open, the seed is dispersed fairly far from the tree, due to small wings on each seed.  It is common for seed to spread more than 100m from the parent tree, thanks to winds.  Although the number of seeds per cone varies, there are usually at least a few dozen seeds in a cone, and sometimes more than a hundred.
 

A mature white spruce will often live to be more than 200 years old.  Some trees live to be many times older than that.  After the first century, as long as the site and growing conditions are adequate, a white spruce will often reach 30m (100 feet) in height, and can have a diameter of more than a meter (3 feet) at the base.  This species can capture very large amounts of carbon.  Our Walker Road property has some beautiful mature white spruce that are starting to approach this size.

Although we don't harvest any of our trees at Replant.ca Environmental, white spruce is often used in the manufacture of acoustic guitars.

One way to distinguish white spruce from red spruce is by the colour of the needles.  The white spruce needles are a bluish-green shade, in contrast to the more yellow-green shade of red spruce needles.

This year, we've planted many thousands of white spruce seedlings at Replant.ca Environmental.  Here's a photo of some of them:

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan Clark
www.replant-environmental.ca



Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.