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Picea glauca
Also called Canadian Spruce, Black Hills Spruce, Western White Spruce, Porsild Spruce, Cat Spruce, Skunk Spruce, Alberta White Spruce
White spruce is a medium-sized evergreen conifer of the northern boreal forests of Canada and the northern United States, typically 15 to 30 m tall. It is hardy and cold-tolerant, and is widely grown as a windbreak, ornamental, and Christmas tree.
Picea glauca, the white spruce, is a species of spruce native to the northern temperate and boreal forests in Canada and United States, North America.
Picea glauca is native from west-central Alaska and east across western, southern/central and eastern Canada to the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, and south to Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Upstate New York and Vermont, along with the mountainous and immediate coastal portions of New Hampshire and Maine, where temperatures are just barely cool and moist enough to support it. There is also an isolated population in the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. It is also known as Canadian spruce, skunk spruce, cat spruce, and in its varieties, Black Hills spruce, western white spruce, Alberta white spruce, and Porsild spruce.
White spruce has a transcontinental range in North America. In Canada, its contiguous distribution encompasses virtually the whole of the Boreal, Subalpine, Montane, Columbia, Great Lakes–St. Lawrence, and Acadian Forest Regions, extending into every province and territory. On the west coast of Hudson Bay, it extends to Seal River, about 59°N, "from which the northward limit runs apparently almost directly north-west to near the mouth of the Mackenzie River, or about latitude 68°". Collins and Sumner reported finding white spruce within 13 km of the Arctic coast in the Firth Valley, Yukon, at about 69°30′ N, 139°30′ W. It reaches within 100 km of the Pacific Ocean in the Skeena Valley, overlapping with the range of Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), and almost reaching the Arctic Ocean at latitude 69° N in the District of Mackenzie, with white spruce up to 15 m high occurring on some of the islands in the Delta near Inuvik.
The wood of white spruce is of a lower quality than that of Engelmann spruce, but is stronger. It was used to make shelters and as firewood by Alaska Natives and European settlers in Alaska, where lodgepole pine does not grow. The wood is of major economic importance in Canada, being harvested for paper and construction.
Norway Spruce · Brewer's Spruce · Jezo Spruce · Black Spruce · Serbian Spruce · Caucasian Spruce · Blue spruce · Schrenk's Spruce · Spruce
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Picea glauca by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
