The Sitka spruce is the world’s largest spruce, with a tall, straight trunk, from a buttressed base, and a broad, open, conical crown of horizontal branches. Sitka spruce is a 50-100 ft. tree with wide spreading, rigidly branched and drooping branchlets. Bark is scaly and dark red-brown. Needles are green on the lower surface, white above. It is a lovely native tree from Alaska to California, where it is an important source of lumber. The main timber tree in Alaska, Sitka Spruce produces high-grade lumber for many uses and wood pulp for newsprint. Special products are piano sounding boards, boats, and food containers. It was formerly used in aircraft construction.
The bark is thin and scaly, flaking off in small circular plates 5–20 cm across. The crown is broad conic in young trees, becoming cylindric in older trees; old trees may have no branches in the lowest 30–40 m. The shoots are very pale buff-brown, almost white, and glabrous. The leaves are stiff, sharp and needle-like, 15–25 mm long, flattened in cross-section, dark glaucous blue-green above with two or three thin lines of stomata, and blue-white below with two dense bands of stomata. The cones are pendulous, slender cylindrical, 5–11 cm long and 2 cm broad when closed, opening to 3 cm broad. Found along the Pacific Coast from Alaska (its State Tree) to California, sometimes very near the ocean. Hardiness zones 6-7.
Growing Instructions
- Soak the seed in water for 24 hours.
- The Sitka spruce likes moist or wet, sandy soil and cool, moist air (e.g., coastal fog belt). Prepare a mixture of half potting soil and half sand, perlite or vermiculite. Put the soil in a pot.
- Sow the seeds 1/8 inch deep.
- Water the seeds.
- Place the pots in an area in sun or shade.
- When the seedlings are a few inches tall, they can be transplanted.