The word spruce began as a label for goods shipped from Prussia
In Middle English, spruce meant things imported from Prussia, wooden objects among them, and the name eventually settled on the tree. Spruces are now the tonewood for guitar soundboards and the classic Christmas tree, and one Swedish Norway spruce clone, Old Tjikko, is claimed to have kept itself going for 9,550 years.
Picea holds 37 species of conifers across the northern temperate forests and the taiga. The Latin name comes from pix, pitch, once made from the resin of Norway spruce, while the English word traces to Old French Pruce, meaning Prussia. Two features separate spruces from other members of the pine family: four-sided needles, roughly square in cross-section, and small woody pegs at the base of each needle that stay on the twig after the needle drops, leaving the branches rough. Needles last four to ten years.
Mature trees range from 10 to 20 metres in small species such as black spruce to as much as 100 metres in the Sitka spruce. Most live 100 to 600 years; an Engelmann spruce holds the single-tree record at 852. Old Tjikko in Dalarna has renewed itself by layering, a form of cloning, so the 9,550-year claim applies to the clone, not the small trunks standing today.
The lineage appears in fossils about 130 million years ago, with the oldest spruce record from the Early Cretaceous of western Canada, around 136 million years old. Yet every living species descends from a branch that split off only about 30 million years ago, so the rest of that ancient group left no survivors. Genetic studies of how the species relate conflict so badly that by 2015 there were more proposed family trees than studies. Hybridisation muddies things further, and it continues between pairs such as Norway and Siberian spruce.
Economically, spruce supplies construction timber and pulp for paper, and it is the standard wood for the soundboards of acoustic guitars and other string instruments. Some Native American peoples weave baskets from the roots. The trees have caught artists' eyes too, from Augustin Hirschvogel's sixteenth-century etchings to Edvard Munch's oil paintings around 1900.
Source: Spruce
