We were skiing through a stand of spruce seedlings on the plateau the other day and I was suprised to see many of them bearing cones. They struck me as too juvenile to be engaged in seed production. So, I looked it up. The book answer is that these spruces can be so slow growing as to be 40 years old by the time they reach five feet in height. Many of these have not reached five feet, and I doubt that many of them are 40 years old either, but they may not be as young as they look. In any case, can my alert reader name the species based on the size of the cone? The answer is here.
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