Two Beautiful Spruces

     Red spruces and blue spruces are planted on lawns in southeastern Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, because they are attractive trees the year around.  They both are forever green, which especially adds beauty to winter landscapes, including lawns, and have handsome, pyramidal shapes and lovely, rustic cones that hang from twigs and enhance their beauties.
     Both these spruce species are native to North America.  Red spruces evolved in northern New England and extreme southeastern Canada, the Adirondack Mountains and here and there in the Appalachian Mountains south to western North Carolina.  Along with Fraser firs, red spruces are THEE coniferous trees on certain peaks of the Smoky Mountains, even forming almost pure stands of themselves here and there.  Blue spruces are native to parts of the Rocky Mountain region.
     Red spruces are not commonly planted on lawns, but are part of many suburban areas in southeastern Pennsylvania.  They have small cones that help to identify this type of spruce.  They are a fairly common, wild spruce in the Pocono Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania.  This species is shade tolerant when young, which helps it get established in the understories of bottomland forests where they are adapted.
     Blue spruces are commonly planted on lawns because of the attractive silvery or pale-blue sheen on their young needles of the season.  That is an unusual color among spruces in North America, which helps make this a popular species for planting.  Older needles are green, which gives blue spruces a two-tone appearance through much of each year.        
     Blue spruce trees have other beauties as well.  Young cones are bright red among the silvery-green needles of new growth, offering a lovely contrast of colors.  And their mature, dead cones are light-beige, giving these evergreen trees more diversity of color.
     Early in May in this area, the buds of new needles open on both species of conifers and the needles grow rapidly at the tip of every twig, offering yet another beauty to those evergreens.
     When the cones of coniferous trees, both wild and planted, mature and die, the scales on each cone opens, which allows the winged seed under each scale the freedom to fall out of the cone and twirl away in the wind to the ground, usually some distance from the parent tree.  Most seeds, however, are eaten by seed-eating, wintering birds, including two kinds of chickadees, two types of nuthatches, American goldfinches, pine siskins and other species.  A variety of rodents, including mice and squirrels, eat a share of the seeds as well.  Some birds and squirrels pick the seeds out of the cones while they are still attached to the trees.  But mice, and many of the other species, eat conifer seeds off the ground where they came to rest.
     Red spruces and blue spruces, like all spruces and firs, protect wildlife from cold winds and predators in winter and provide protective nurseries for certain kinds of birds to raise young in.  Great horned owls perch in them by day throughout the year to rest.  Red-tailed hawks, Cooper's hawks, mourning doves and American robins are some of the bird species that rest in them overnight through the year. 
     And all the bird species mentioned above, and others, raise young in these spruces and other kinds of conifers, in the wild and on lawns.  Conifers are not only attractive to us, but benefit many kinds of wildlife as well.     
     Red spruces and blue spruces are planted on lawns for their many beauties.  And those same conifers benefit certain kinds of adaptable birds and mammals as well.  They provide wining situations on many lawns.