The North American European spruce

[Eugene]

Here's something to which I have not given any effort at exploration. Another thread got me stewing on this. European/German/Italian/alpine/whatever spruce has been widely used in eastern US efforts at forest plantations. Here, the tree is usually called Norway spruce. Because a cut-and-paste from somewhere online is a whole heap easier than typing transcriptions from Harlow, Harrar, and White, Textbook of Dendrology, www.eFloras.org offers this:

Picea abies (Linnaeus) H. Karsten, Deut. Fl. 2/3: 324. 1881.
Norway spruce, épinette de Norvège

Trees to 30 m; trunk to 2 m diam; crown conic. Bark gray-brown, scaly. Branches short and stout, the upper ascending, the lower drooping; twigs stout, reddish brown, usually glabrous. Buds reddish brown, 5--7mm, apex acute. Leaves 1-2.5 cm, 4-angled in cross section, rigid, light to dark green, bearing stomates on all surfaces, apex blunt-tipped. Seed cones (10-)12-16 cm; scales diamond-shaped, widest near middle, 18-30/15-20 mm, thin and flexuous, margin at apex erose to toothed, apex extending 6-10 mm beyond seed-wing impression. 2 n =24.

Norway spruce, native to Europe, has become locally naturalized, at least in north central United States (and adjacent Canada). The species is the most widely cultivated spruce in North America; many cultivars exist, including dwarf shrubs.
100-ft tall trees with 6-ft diameter trunks aren't huge as far as conifers go, but that's not tiny either. Does anybody know if those US plantings of P. abies, that, I beleive, have been planted here almost as long as European colonists have been planting anything here, are ever harvested with an intent to subject them to luthiery? If not, why not?

[sunburst]

I've seen the trees growing in mixed stands with red spruce. When they grow in the same place like that, the trees look a lot alike. You can tell them apart by the cones, though.

I don't know of any American grown European spruce being used for tops. Almost all the trees that I've seen were ornamental, and grew too fast to have tight enough grain to be considered for tops by most luthiers. There might be some somewhere, though, that would work fine.

[Paul Hostetter]

Bruce Harvie will probably tag in here soon. I hope so. In any case, as John said already, all the feral Picea abies I've seen that grew in the US usually grew way too fast to be at all interesting. The nice grain we tend to covet usually only happens in significant stands where a lot of trees grow up together at the same time, starting a long time ago. The concept of "old growth" is not likely to apply to any non-native spruces we're likely to see harvested in our lifetimes. In other words, 100' with 6' trunks and 6 lines to the inch isn't going to be of much use. This is what you get from Christmas tree farms that go native (I have several in my area), or from street trees.

[Eugene]

Thanks for the thoughts, gentlemen.