Black spruce

“ When once you know the spruces by the looks or the feel, you will begin to know the white from the red and black spruce by the colour. Everything about the white spruce is paler than the others. The foliage is light, almost pea-green, and the bark is not ruddy but grayish-brown. There are thousands of acres of spruce woods in our northern Central and New England states. Boys and girls on camping trips can sometimes collect spruce gum enough to [82] pay expenses and have fun doing it. ”

“ But it was too cold to stand long, and she was anxious to start her inspection of the lot of black spruce. She had learned all she could about trees and lumber generally since she had been at Ripple, and her education was so far advanced that she could tell black spruce when she saw it, also cedar, ash, maple, birch, and oak. She was wise enough already to understand that it was a really valuable lot of trees that stood in serried rows bordering on the old tote road. Sophy had told her that black spruce was valuable because it was so largely used for pulp for paper-making. ”

“ The same elements which help to give it being and life are ever ready to catch it unawares, to rend it limb from limb, or by patient, long-continued attack bring it crashing to the very dust from which sprang the seed.
We see a mighty spruce whose black leafage has waved above its fellows for a century or more, paying for its supremacy by the distortion of every branch. Such are to be seen clinging to the rocky shores of Fundy, every branch and twig curved toward the land; showing the years of battling with constant gales and blizzards. ”

“ The black spruce is the northern brother of the red, and is really a Canadian tree which occasionally reaches down into the United States. It reaches the Mackenzie River on the north and covers large areas in Manitoba. ”

“ The rate of growth in the very dense stands that are usual in that latitude is decidedly slow except where the soil and drainage conditions happen to be just right. Black spruce on semi-muskeg, a site of average quality for that species, is only four to five inches in diameter breast height at one hundred years. White spruce is rather fastidious regarding moisture conditions and only appears on fairly well-drained spots, attaining there a size of eight to twelve inches diameter within a century. Poplar in that time reaches eight to ten inches. ”

“ He was as spruce as if he had just donned a new suit, his black hood like velvet, his chestnut of the richest, and his white of the whitest, and he sang from the top of a small pine-tree; sometimes, in the restless way of his family, scrambling over the branches, and again shifting his position to a small birch-tree. ”

“ There are large areas of nearly bare rock, where only a few stunted conifers or poplars grow in the crevices. Where the soil is sparse, and the country low-lying but yet fairly well drained, there is an open forest, chiefly black spruce, and the ground is covered with a dense mat of moss interlaced with fibrous roots. The soil covered, and the swampy areas, are usually thickly overgrown with small shrubs, mostly alder. In general the timber is rather small, in most parts of the district at present too small even for pulpwood or ties. ”

“ BARK.—Twigs smooth, gray-green, becoming orange-brown, finally dark gray-brown; thin, light gray-brown on the trunk, separating into thin, plate-like scales.
WOOD.—Light, soft, weak, straight-grained, light yellow, with sapwood of the same color.
DISTRIBUTION.—Common in the northern half of the Lower Peninsula and throughout the Upper Peninsula.
HABITAT.—Low, damp woods; banks of streams; borders of lakes; high rocky or sandy slopes; loves the cold winters.
NOTES.—A vigorous and beautiful tree in regions sufficiently cold.
[Pg 22]
Black Spruce
1. ”

“ I don't think they can stand it. There is a variety of white spruce that grows in the Black Hills, which I think will be decided to be a different species when botanists come to study it, that will stand our prairies. Another tree that we like is the Colorado blue spruce; it is hardy and grows excellently. About twenty-three years ago, when Professor Verner was at the head of the Forestry Department at Washington he sent me 8,000 evergreens, and I set them out. They were bull pine and the Scotch pine and Austrian pine. ”

“ European spruce is often locally known as white deal.
Spruce trees have single, sharp-pointed, short leaves, pointing everywhere, and keeled above and below so as to appear four-sided; the cones hang down. Spruce may be distinguished from the pines, firs, and hemlocks by the fact that pine leaves are longer and in clusters, that hemlock leaves are flat, blunt, and two-ranked, and that fir cones point upward. The genus picea has twelve species, five of which are North American. The resins of the black and red spruce are used as confections. [p149] ”

“ Beginning our observations on the coast, we find that near the sea we have, for the characteristic tree, the black spruce (Abies Menziesii ) . It grows to a diameter of eight feet, and to a considerable height, though not the tallest of the spruces. Its branches commence about thirty feet from the ground, growing densely, while its leaves, unlike the other species, grow all round the twig. The foliage is dark green with a bluish cast. The bark is reddish and scaly, and the cones, which grow near the ends of the branches, are about two inches in length, and ”

“ There, after the clean sweep, we may allow fifty years for blueberries and bird-cherries, a hundred more for beech, birch and maple to grow and supply mould of the proper consistency from their falling leaves in which spruce and fir seedlings will take root. After that, if all works well, another hundred will see such a forest of black growth as is going down the Pemigewasset daily now on the flat cars of the logging railroad. ”

“ Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. ”

“ WHITE SPRUCE (Picea canadensis) ranges from Labr. to Alaska, s. to N.E., centr. parts of Mich. and Wis., the Black Hills. w. slopes of the Rockies in Can. and Mont. Not a large or valuable tree except for paper pulp, it is the most ornamental eastern spruce. ”

“ On the lower banks the timber is mostly cleared off. Upon the higher slopes grow the mountain mahogany and the scrub maple wherever there is a foot of soil. There is a fine, sturdy growth of abies. The spruce, or white pine, rises in a beautifully regular cone often 100 feet high; there are two principal varieties of fir, one with smooth light bark, and the other, which loves a higher range, and looks black as it bristles out of its snowy bed, is of a dun russet. ”

“ In none other does it appear to change, and even then it casts not off the old—it only puts on the new in tenderer and fresher beauty! The new growth of the spruce and fir, the pale yellowish-green tips set in the dark old background, are exquisitely lovely; nor are the light green shoots of the white, yellow, and pitch pine much, less beautiful. ”

“ It is by far the most majestic spruce I ever beheld in any forest, and one of the largest and longest lived of the giants that flourish throughout the main pine belt, often attaining a height of nearly 200 feet, and a diameter of six or seven. Where the growth is not too close, the strong, spreading branches come more than halfway down the trunk, and these are hung with innumerable slender, swaying sprays, that are handsomely feathered with the short leaves which radiate at right angles all around them. ”

“ On these steep places the birch and maple will not grow, or at least they occur but sparsely. The higher slopes and sharp ridges of the mountains are always covered with soft-wood timber. Spruce and hemlock and balsam strike their roots among the rocks, and find a hidden nourishment. They stand close together; thickets of small trees spring up among the large ones; from year to year the great trunks are falling one across another, and the undergrowth is thickening around them, until a spruce forest seems to be almost impassable. ”

“ The black ash is a lover of marshes, found from Newfoundland to Manitoba, and from Virginia to Arkansas. Its blue-black winter buds, the sombre green of its foliage, and the dark hues of its bark and wood have justified the popular name of this handsome, slender tree. The leaflets, oval and long-pointed, are sessile on the hairy leaf stalk, except the terminal one. At maturity the leaves are a foot or more in length, of seven to eleven leaflets, that turn brown and fall early in autumn. The keys of the black ash are borne in open panicles, eight to ten inches long ”

“ All our foliage alike is, strictly speaking, annual, and all alike deciduous; but while oaks and beeches shed their dead leaves in our climate in autumn, pines, firs, and hollies retain theirs on the tree till the succeeding spring, and then let them drop quietly off, unperceived amid the pale glory of the fresh green foliage. The larch is a well-known example of a conifer which behaves in this respect like the oak or the birch; while its ally, the spruce-fir, keeps on the dead or dying leaves through the winter months, and then shuffles them off unobtrusively as the new foliage develops. ”

“ The seeds are winged, and the wind scatters them. They germinate best on humus. In spruce forests, clumps of seedlings are often seen where logs have decayed and fallen to dust. Seedlings do not thrive on mineral soil, and for that reason red spruce makes a poor showing where fires have burned. It does not spread vigorously in old fields as white pine does. It must have forest conditions or it will do little good. For that reason it does not promise great things for the future. It grows very slowly, and land owners prefer white pine, where that species will grow. ”

“ The other species of ash found in this country are not so important as the white, but the black ash is remarkable as the slenderest deciduous tree of its height to be found in the forest. It is often seventy or eighty feet tall, with a trunk not more than a foot around. The color of the trunk is a dark granite-gray and the bark is rough. The wood is remarkable for its toughness, and for making baskets the Indians prefer it to any other, except the trunk of a young white oak. ”

“ Nothing but its scarcity stands in the way of its becoming an important timber tree. The best of it is a satisfactory substitute for white pine in the manufacture of doors. It grows rapidly, and the wide rings contain a high percentage of light colored springwood, though there is enough summerwood of darker color to give the dressed lumber a character. It weighs about the same as northern white pine, but is weaker. In South Carolina and Florida it is called white pine, but the name spruce is more general. It is known also as kingstree, poor pine, Walter’s pine, and lowland spruce pine. ”

“ Yet perhaps that which contains in itself the greatest number of the elements of beauty, is the medium-sized pyramidal tree, be it of spruce, Norway pine, or balsam fir. It unites at once, in its pyramidal shape, the strength and majesty of the old, and in its gracefully curved limbs and abundant leaves, the beauty and freshness of the young tree. When loaded down with a spotless burden of snow until its limbs are almost ready to break, no pyramid of art, no monument chiselled by human hands, can hope to approach its pure and model beauty. ”

“ For there had been a white mist that morning—autumnʼs breath made visible; and the tree with its net of spiderʼs webs had caught the lucid moisture. Now, as the early sunlight opened through the layered vapours, that little spruce came boldly forth a dark bay of the forest, and met all the spears of the orient. Looped and traced with threads of gauze, the lacework of a fairyʼs thought, scarcely daring to breathe upon its veil of tremulous chastity, it kept the wings of light on the hover, afraid to weigh down the whiteness. ”

“ For these acorns grew on oak-trees, and we find them driven into the bark of pines and spruces.
This it is which gives our specimen its particular interest. While oaks and pines may be intermingled, though they naturally prefer different soils and situations, and in the Rocky Mountains the pine-belt lies above the oak region, spruce and oak trees do not grow in the same soil. The spruce-belt stands higher up than the pine. As these nuts are stored in the bark of a spruce-tree, we have clear evidence that the bird must have carried them some distance. ”

“ The trunk is covered with greyish brown bark, which is smooth when the tree is young; but as the tree grows old—and the Silver Fir will live for four hundred years—this bark cracks into many rugged fissures. You remember that the Spruce tree has a sharp spear-like point rising from the very top of the trunk. In the Silver Fir the tree is only pointed when very young, and by the time it is full grown the top is bushy, with many small unequal branches standing out from the main stem. ”

“ One cone-shaped spruce had a base diameter of four feet and came to a point a few inches less than four feet above the earth. Here and there a tough, tall tree manages to stand erect. The high wind either prevents growing or trims off all limbs that do not point to leeward. Some appear as though molded and pressed into shape. A profile of others, with long, streaming-bannered limbs, gives a hopeful view, for they present an unconquerable and conscious appearance, like tattered pennants or torn, triumphant battle-flags of the victorious forest! ”