EVERGREEN TREES A NR SHRUBS. 539 
The Black and Red Spruces. Abies 
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 a fo?'eign 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 sometimes 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 
gives 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 
sandy 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 
Fig. 171. 
