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White Spruce

Picea glauca

Traditional Indigenous Names 4

Cree: Minahik
Ojibwe: Zesegaandag
Dene: Tzu’cho
Michif: La nipint blaan

Summary from Wikipedia 5

Picea glauca, the white spruce, is a species of spruce native to the northern temperate and boreal forests in North America. Picea glauca was originally native from central Alaska all through the east, across southern/central Canada to the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. It now has become naturalized southward into the far northern United States border states like Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine; there is also an isolated pop

Easy identifiers 4

White Spruce has stiff needles that release a strong odor when they are crushed. White Spruce needles grow individually on a twig which is characteristic of most spruce trees. A cross-section of a White Spruce needle shows that it has four distinct sides like a square or a diamond and white spruce twigs are not hairy unlike black spruce which do have hairy twigs. Its branches are mostly horizontal, sometimes they droop but will have upturned tips. Their crown is dense but lacks a smooth uniform appearance.

Form 4

A dense evergreen tree with a pyramidal crown composed of horizontal branches, often the lower branches having upturned tips.

Bark 4

Thin, grey-to-brown scales that flake off readily on older trees; inner bark cinnamon-to-light silverish-white.

Twigs 4

Irregularly whorled, yellowish-brown, becoming darker with age, covered with small, elongated, spirally arranged leaf bases making twigs and branches rough. Buds 6 millimetres (1/4 inch) long with many overlapping brown scales.

Leaves 4

Single, sharp-pointed, needle-like, stiff, four-sided, whitened along sides, up to about 15 millimetres (3/4 inch) long; more numerous on upper side of twig.

Flowers 4

May, solitary on preceding year's twig, red or yellow, oval.

Fruit 4

Cones which usually drop in one year but some often persist scattered about the crown; 3 - 6 centimetres (1 1/2 - 2 inches) long; scales brown, thin.

Occurrence 4

Common throughout the forested region on well-drained habitats or along streams and around lakes.

Fun facts 4

White Spruce is Manitoba's provincial tree. When White Spruce needles are crushed it releases a strong smell, which is why one of White Spruce's nicknames is 'skunk spruce'. They are sometimes grown as Christmas trees because they have an attractive dense round crown when given the space to grow.

Sources and Credits

  1. (c) Shuk Han (Nancy) Mak, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Shuk Han (Nancy) Mak
  2. (c) Manitoba Forestry, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Manitoba Forestry
  3. (c) Greg Johnson, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC), uploaded by Greg Johnson
  4. (c) Manitoba Forestry, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)
  5. Adapted by Manitoba Forestry from a work by (c) Wikipedia, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picea_glauca

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