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Picea rubens
Also called Eastern Spruce, Yellow Spruce, He Balsam
Picea rubens, commonly known as red spruce, is a species of spruce native to eastern North America, ranging from Nova Scotia to eastern Quebec and south-eastern Ontario, and south through the Adirondack Mountains and New England along the Appalachians to western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. This species is also known as yellow spruce, West Virginia spruce, eastern spruce, and he-balsam. Red spruce is the provincial tree of Nova Scotia.
Red spruce grows at a slow to moderate rate, lives for 250 to 450+ years, and is very shade-tolerant when young. It is often found in pure stands or forests mixed with eastern white pine, balsam fir, or black spruce. Along with Fraser fir, red spruce is one of two primary tree types in the southern Appalachian spruce-fir forest, a distinct ecosystem found only in the highest elevations of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Its habitat is moist but well-drained sandy loam, often at high altitudes. Red spruce can be easily damaged by windthrow and acid rain.
Red spruce is used for Christmas trees and is an important wood used in making paper pulp. It is also an excellent tonewood and is used in many higher-end acoustic guitars and violins, as well as sound boards. The sap can be used to make spruce gum. Leafy red spruce twigs are boiled with sugar and flavoring to make spruce beer or spruce pudding. It can be used as construction lumber and is good for millwork and for crates.
Norway Spruce · Interior spruce · Alcock's Spruce · Dragon Spruce · Orange Spruce · Picea austropanlanica · Sargent's Spruce · Brewer's Spruce · Chihuahua Spruce · Qinghai Spruce · Engelmann Spruce · Farrer spruce
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Picea rubens by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
