EVERGREEN TREES AND SHRUBS. 



539 



The Black AND Red Spruces. Abies Fig. 171. 



nigra. A. rubra. — These beautiful na- 

 tives of our northern border have been 

 under a cloud, or rather in the shadow of 

 a great foreign rival. The beautiful im- 

 ported Norway spruce has so many good 

 •qualities, in. addition to the prestige of 

 being z, foreign tree, that no native of only 

 ■equal merit can vie with it in popularity. 

 Yet our black spruce, which more than 

 any other resembles the Norway spruce, 

 is in some respects a finer tree. The 

 latter is the more graceful in the first ten 

 years of its growth, but afterwards the 

 droop of its branches is sometiiftes saggy 

 rather than graceful. The black spruce is more sturdy looking in 

 its outline, and its branches which have a more upright direction at 

 first, afterwards bear themselves in nearly horizontal, but not 

 drooping masses, having apparently more strength than those of the 

 Norway. This alone gives it an expression that, as far as it goes, 

 makes it a superior tree. Fig. 171 is a portrait of a specimen 

 growing wild on Mt. Desert Island, on the coast of Maine, and 

 ^ives a very correct idea of the character of the tree. Its rate of 

 growth is from two to three feet a year in good soils, or about the 

 same as that of the Norway spruce ; but it does not eventually 

 become so lofty a tree, eighty feet being its maximum height. The 

 author, in the spring of 1847, planted a Norway spruce and a black 

 ■spruce of the bluish-green sort contiguous to each other, in a warm 

 isandy loam. Both trees proved to be superb representatives of 

 their species. The former is now (1870) about fifty feet in height, 

 and the latter forty-five feet, and each covers an area of thirty feet 

 in diameter ; their lower branches resting upon the ground. But 

 the black spruce, if the wood and foliage of both could be weighed 

 entire, would be found the heavier of the two. The horizontal 

 branches of the latter have the appearance of bending with the 

 weight of their foliage, while those of the Norway spruce decline so 

 -directly from the trunk as to convey the idea of a sag, rather than 



