Spruces

It was hot, dry, and windy today at Parowan's tree nursery. I was watering some of the seedlings and decided that most of the spruce trees in the nursery didn't look too good. I went around and soaked them with the hose until each one was practically standing in a pond. That is probably not the way to do it either, but then I got to thinking about spruces. Whenever you see a conifer tree encroaching on a wet meadow or a riparian area in the real world, what kind of tree is it? It is usually a spruce. They don't seem to be as sensitive as other trees to an over-soggy environment. In southern Utah, you will often see Engelmann, or even Colorado blue spruces with their roots in the creek. In the Black Hills of South Dakota, where I made this picture, it is the white spruce trees that tend to be in the damp meadows watered by ephemeral creeks. I even got to thinking about the black spruces that grow on floating mats in the bogs of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. We're not going to grow our nursery trees in a bog, but it might be that the spruces could do with a little more water than the others.