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The Ice Age Survivor That Became a Garden Favorite Serbian spruce is a graceful, narrow conifer with a genuinely remarkable backstory: a tree that once grew across a much wider stretch of Europe, was pushed nearly to extinction by successive ice ages, and today survives in the wild on a strip of land smaller than … Read more
The Stately Conifer of the High Rockies Engelmann spruce is the tree standing at timberline in the Rocky Mountains, a tall, narrow, spire-shaped conifer that thrives in exactly the cold, wet, high-altitude conditions few other trees can tolerate. Look for the tallest, straightest trees near the edge of a subalpine forest, and there’s a good … Read more
Spruce trees belong to the genus Picea, a group of evergreen conifers recognized by their stiff, four-sided needles attached singly to small, persistent, peg-like structures on the twig, a distinctive feature that separates spruce from fir and most other conifers at a glance. The genus name comes from the ancient Latin word for pitch, originally … Read more
Fir trees belong to the genus Abies, a group of evergreen conifers in the pine family recognized by their needle-like leaves that grow directly from the branch and leave a distinctive round, suction-cup-shaped scar once they fall. The genus contains somewhere between 40 and 56 recognized species depending on the source, with most modern counts … Read more
The boreal forest isn’t one uniform block of trees stretching across the northern hemisphere. Ecologists studying the biome, going back to a foundational 1972 classification by researchers Hare and Ritchie, have long divided it into distinct structural zones that shift as you move from its warmer southern edge toward the Arctic tundra, along with a … Read more
The boreal forest biome is the largest land biome on Earth, a vast band of coniferous forest that rings the entire northern hemisphere between roughly 50 and 65 degrees north latitude. Also called taiga, a Russian word now used almost interchangeably with “boreal forest” in scientific literature, it forms a distinct ecological zone sandwiched between … Read more
The Canadian boreal forest is one of the largest intact forest ecosystems on Earth, stretching across roughly 53 to 60 percent of the country’s total land area, depending on which government or research source is doing the counting. It represents about a third of the entire circumpolar boreal forest that rings the northern hemisphere, and … Read more
Hickory trees belong to the genus Carya, a group of deciduous, pinnately compound-leaved trees prized for producing some of the hardest, strongest, and most shock-resistant wood of any tree native to North America. The genus name comes from the ancient Greek word for nut, a fitting root given that hickory nuts, most famously the pecan, … Read more
Fringe tree is a native North American flowering tree that deserves far more attention than it usually gets, its clouds of delicate, fringe-petaled white blooms rivaling anything sold at a nursery for spring drama, yet it remains a relatively uncommon sight in most home landscapes. The NC State Extension goes so far as to call … Read more
Fringetree gets its common name, and its scientific genus name Chionanthus, from the Greek words for snow and flower, a fitting description for a tree that covers itself in delicate, fringe-petaled white blooms each spring. It belongs to the olive family, the same family that includes ash trees and lilacs, and that relationship has turned … Read more