The Norway Spruce tree (Picea abies)

The Norway spruce is also known as the European spruce.  The Latin name for this tree is Picea abies.  You may wonder why I'm talking about this species despite the fact that it is not originally native to North America.  I'll explain that shortly.

First, let's cover a few basics.  Norway spruce is typically native to northern, central, and eastern Europe.  It doesn't like warm temperatures, so it's not common in southern Europe (although pockets do exist).  It is very closely related to the Siberian spruce, which is found commonly east of the Urals.

Norway spruce has become a relatively common tree in North America, despite not being a native species.  Globally, this species is one of the most widely planted of all trees, both inside and outside its native range.  Norway spruce is planted frequently within the cooler northern parts of the United States, and through eastern Canada.  It is so prevalent that there are now naturalized populations from the Great Lakes to parts of the northeastern seaboard.  It fits quite well into parts of Canada's temperate forest, and even grows well in parts of the southeastern boreal forest (at least where the climate is suitable).

Norway spruce is a very large conifer, often growing to heights of more than 40 meters, and diameters of more than a meter.  More importantly, it is very fast-growing compared to most other spruce species, especially for the first twenty-five years.  Typically, when you see mixed species plantations, you'll notice that pine trees grow very quickly (because they love sunlight) and spruce trees lag behind quite significantly, but the spruce trees slowly start to catch up after a few decades.  Norway spruce narrows that gap significantly.  Here's a photo of a semi-mature tree:

You'll notice that this particular urban tree looks quite symmetrical and full.  It has a nice shape to it.  Norway spruce has high commercial value, and not just for pulp and lumber.  It's also a very popular tree for the cultivation of Christmas trees, and used for this purpose all over the world.  Oslo (the capital of Norway) donates a large Norway spruce Christmas tree to the cities of London, Edinborough, and Washington DC each year, as thanks for the aid that the US and UK gave to Norway during World War II.  Norway spruce are also commonly used as ornamental trees in parks and gardens in many parts of the world (as long as the climate is suitable).

The needles of the Norway spruce are four-sided (quadrangular).  This means that if you take a needle and try to "roll" it between your thumb and finger, it rolls quite easily.  In contract, the needles for some species don't do this.  Balsam fir, as an example, is a three-sided needle but it's a very shallow profile (almost two-sided), so balsam fir needles won't roll easily between your fingers.  The needles of the Norway spruce have quite blunt tips.  Here's a photo of some lush foilage.

The seed cones of the Norway spruce are record-setting among the various spruce species for having the longest length.  Some full-sized cones can be almost twenty centimeters (eight inches) long.  These cones start out being either reddish or greenish in colour, but about half a year after they are pollinated, they mature to a rich brown colour.

Here are a few fun facts about the Norway spruce:

1.  This species is so fast-growing that in some areas, it grows to reach the appropriate size for Christmas trees in as little as four years.

2.  This is another species which is especially suitable for making beer (the brew is made from young branches with the richest needles).

3.  There is a Norway spruce tree in Sweden which has been nicknamed Old Tjikko.  This tree, which grew as a clone from a root system, has been dated as being 9,550 years old.  It is the oldest known individual living tree of any species (some trembling aspen clusters are much older).


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.

The Black Spruce tree (Picea mariana)

Today's post is about a species which rarely gets any love.  It's the swamp-loving black spruce (Latin name Picea mariana).  Here's a typical photo, which I took from a helicopter in northern Alberta (the majority of these trees are black spruce):

Oddly enough, the black spruce doesn't have any other common names (except in French), regardless of where you find it across Canada.  And you WILL find black spruce all across Canada.  Its geographic range is much more diverse than even the Jack pine.  Black spruce can be found in all ten provinces and all three Arctic territories.  Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

It's quite easy to find specimens of black spruce.  Just look for a swamp.  Black spruce thrives in wet areas, even when the water is quite stagnant.  Remember that all spruce trees love water, but most varieties prefer flowing, oxygenated water.

Black spruce has roots that are especially shallow and wide-spreading.  This allows it to thrive in areas which are too wet for competing species.  Trees, like many other creatures, can drown.  Shallow roots help ensure that the black spruce does well in swamps.  Trees need water, but they also need oxygen.  Flood their root systems, and they will eventually die.  Some trees can only tolerate root submersion for as little a week or so before they start to die.  The black spruce can survive for more than a month.  Regardless, their shallow roots make it less likely that they won't have any access to oxygen for extended periods.  Unfortunately, it also makes this species susceptible to blowdown in windstorms.

If you take a close look at black spruce trees near bogs and swamps, you'll see that the closer you get to water, the less vigorous the growth.

Spruce trees rarely grow to be large trees.  It is quite common for mature black spruce trees to be no more than 15m in height, although they can occasionally grow to 25m in really good conditions.  However, you're more likely to see them in the 10m to 15m range.  The trunk rarely grows to more than 50cm in diameter (a foot and a half) for a large tree.  On a positive note, black spruce usually have very straight trunks, without a significant taper until the very top of the tree.

The top of the black spruce is interesting.  The crown is narrow and pointed, and the small branches all droop, yet the tips are turned upward.  Unlike the tips, the cones hang downward.  Here's an excellent photo from Wikimedia Commons:

One of the more interesting things that many people learn about the black spruce is their long-term fire ecology behaviour.  Black spruce trees often live in peat bogs, as well as swamps.  Despite the moist ground, black spruce stands are especially susceptible to wildfires.  If you're puzzled about this, it's important to know that monocultures (especially conifers) are often especially susceptible to wildfires, while mixed-wood forests with lots of species such as aspen will be less susceptible.  Since black spruce is so much more tolerant of swampy/boggy conditions than most other trees (except for larch/tamarack), it tends to grow frequently in pure stands.  These pure stands are susceptible to fire, despite the wet ground.

Black spruce stands tend to burn frequently, but they also regenerate quickly immediately after a fire (just like lodgepole pine).  Therefore, a lot of black spruce stands tend to be very even-aged.  Over time (centuries), swampy areas with black spruce will often slowly become filled in by organics, and the surface of the ground will become elevated and drier.  As this happens, there will be ingress from moderately moisture-tolerant species such as tamarack, white cedar, white spruce, balsam fir, and eventually balsam poplar and trembling aspen.  Don't judge black spruce as an ugly swamp tree with no significant value.  In the long term, it's an important precursor to more diverse mature mixed-wood forests.


I'll leave you with three random facts about the black spruce:
- This is the provincial tree of Newfoundland and Labrador.
- Like red spruce, it is good for making spruce beer.
- Disposable chopsticks are often made of black spruce (or trembling aspen).

That's all for now.  I hope you enjoyed reading this, and it made you appreciate this species a bit more.  We don't plant very much black spruce at Replant.ca Environmental, simply because it's not great for long-term carbon capture, but it does occupy a small percentage of our annual seedling mixes due to its suitability (along with cedar and tamarack) in swampy ground.  Here's a photo of some of our black spruce seedlings:

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.

The Red Spruce tree (Picea rubens)

For this week's look at various trees that we plant at Replant.ca Environmental, I'm going to focus on the red spruce.  As is common with many different tree species, this one is known by many names.  The other names that I'm most accustomed to hearing are eastern spruce, Maritime spruce, and yellow spruce.  The Latin name is Picea rubens.

Red spruce is an extremely common and valuable tree in eastern Canadian forestry.  Due to its versatility and economic value, it is the most commonly planted tree in the Maritime provinces.  Although it isn't the fastest-growing conifer, it is considered to be a late succession tree.  This means that it "catches up and wins," like the tortoise in the fable of "the tortoise and the hare."  The red spruce can often live to be 250-400 years old.

When the red spruce is young, it prefers to grow in moist soils.  It helps if the groundwater moisture is aerated.  Well-drained soils, or soils that are moistened by flowing water, are ideal.  However, red spruce is quite versatile, and will still thrive in many other types of ground conditions.  Red spruce is quite biologically similar to black spruce (a species which does really well in swampy areas with more stagnant water).  Red spruce is also extremely shade-tolerant when it is young.  This is important, because spruce trees generally grow more slowly than other conifers (such as pine) for the first decade or two.  Due to this slower start, spruce usually fail to get above competing grass and vegetation for several years.  However, they don't usually get choked out by plant competition due to their shade tolerance.

When a red spruce matures, it can be twenty to twenty-five meters in height (seventy to eighty feet).  A mature tree will often achieve a DBH (diameter at breast height) of 50cm to 60cm (up to two feet).  Red spruce often grows straighter than conifers such as red pine and white pine.  Although the red spruce doesn't grow as large as an eastern white pine, it's a beautiful and long-lived species in its own right.  Perhaps this is why the red spruce is the provincial tree of Nova Scotia.

Red spruce is mostly an eastern Canadian and northeast US seaboard species.  Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Spruce needles and balsam fir needles often look very similar to someone who doesn't spend a lot of time in the woods.  However, there's a neat trick that you can do to distinguish between them.  Spruce needles are four-sided.  When you put a needle between two fingers and try to "roll" it, it rolls easily.  Balsam fir needles are three-sided but their shape is like a very flattened triangle.  Due to this shape, balsam fir needles don't roll easily between your fingers.  This trick can still be a bit confusing.  If you use a lot of pressure, it's still possible to "roll" the needles of a balsam fir.  And if the spruce needles are sticky or if your fingers are rough, they don't necessarily roll perfectly.  However, if you are out in the woods and see two trees that look slightly different, and you think one is a spruce and one is a fir, try the needle-roll test.  Also, try grabbing a branch and squeezing.  Be careful though!  Spruce needles are much more pointy at the ends, so they'll feel a lot more prickly than fir needles.

If you're looking at the trunk of a juvenile tree, the appearance of spruce and fir are quite different.  Spruce trees will look scaly, and usually have a yellowish-brown or reddish-brown colour.  They will also have more needles on the trunk.  Conversely, a juvenile balsam fir tree will usually have grey bark, and it's usually quite smooth with almost no needles, except maybe some spare needles on the top foot or so of the tree.  The bark of each of these trees becomes much more rough as the trees passes the juvenile stage.  Both types of trees will develop vertical furrows on the bark, although the furrows will be more pronounced on spruce trees.

Take a close look at the underside of this red spruce branch.  What obvious colour patterns do you see?

When you look at a red spruce branch on a young tree, the new growth has a yellowish tinge, and the older growth has a brownish tinge.

Here are four interesting facts about the red spruce:

1.  This tree is monoecious.  This means that individual flowers (cones) are either male or female, but both sexes can be found on the same tree.  The cones are cross-pollinated by wind.

2.  Red spruce trees do not do well in areas with high atmospheric pollution, or "acid rain" (rain contaminated by industrial smoke and chemicals).  This is one more reason to keep our earth clean.  There's a slogan that says, "The solution to pollution is dilution."  I think a better solution is to avoid polluting in the first place.

3.  Red spruce is the most sought-after wood for making most musical instruments.

4.  Spruce twigs can be boiled with sugar, and the resulting liquid can be used to make spruce beer.  I think a lot of people would prefer spruce beer to hemlock tea.


As I mentioned, the red spruce is the most economically valuable species in the Maritime provinces, and is planted very frequently in post-logging operations.  Unfortunately, in that type of work, the logging companies generally plant it as a monoculture.  At Replant.ca Environmental, we endorse biodiversity.  Red spruce is definitely an important species within our planting mixes, but we never plant it by itself.  Here's a photo of some of our red spruce seedlings:

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.

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.