Could be southeastern European - Romania, Bulgaria, etc. Origins from that area (sometimes distinguished as Picea abies var. acuminata) tend to have more acuminate scales, and have also generally proved the best performers in Britain.

How long are the longest cones? I've found cones in UK plantations up to 19cm long, though the longest wild origin I found in Bulgaria is 16cm, about the same as the longest I have from the Alps and shorter than my longest from Schwartzwald (18cm, but could be cultivated not wild). Cones from Norway are much shorter, 8-13cm, as are cones from high altitudes in the Alps.

Resin

Resin:

Yes, I thought the larger coned spruce might be from a southeastern European origin. What brought this to mind now is I just ordered 50 seedlings from the Virginia State nursery that I am pretty sure are from a Romanian seed source.

I am sorry--I am at my Virginia place now, and the cones are up at my timberland place, so I can't measure now. But they are very long--I am guessing, but I am almost sure they would be longer than 16 cm, and maybe longer than 18 cm. When I get back up there--I hope in a week or so, I will measure and get back to you.

Actually, the longest cones I have found are from a tree--just one tree--on my own timberland. But these very long cones don't look like the ones from the stand at Glady in other respects.

Oh, another characteristic of the cones I forgot to mention before is that the ends of the scales have a tendency to curve outward, something I don't usually see, or see so prominently, in cones from other sources.

Another question/issue that interests me: I notice that trees in some plantations have more diversity than others. In some stands most of the trees are reasonably similar to each other. There is always some diversity in a variety of characteristics. But in some other stands the trees often are very, very different from each other in their appearance. Probably the most notable example of this that I know is one of the stands on my own timberland, where I almost never see two trees growing next to each other that look very much alike at all. And there are more than just two or three "types" of variation--the differences in growth and appearance are "all over the place" so to speak. I think this is wonderful, but I also wonder if that tendency towards so much diversity can be an indicator of seed source. Are there some areas of Europe where the Norway spruce trees show more diversity than others?

Of course, one possibility is that my stand came from more than one seed source, but from what I know about how nurseries grow seedlings and and seed companies collect and sell seed, that seems unlikely. Of course one part of a plantation could be from one source, and another part from another source, but in my stand, the diversity is really all mixed together--there is no one part where trees have more of any one characteristic than another.

--Spruce

Norway spruce is widespread, fragmented,frequently planted (over centuries), and widely studied. Cone color comes in two flavors as you indicate, but in natural forests both are usually present. There may be a climatic influence. Two varieties and four forms have been named, based on cone color. Cone scale characters have been studied intensively, with numerous varieties and forms named. Cone characters, including size, are strictly heritable and are under control of the seed parent, so tree-to-tree variation is the rule in any natural population. Your trees could have come from anywhere so you probably shouldn't put too much importance on your observations of their variability.

Pinetree:

Yes. Dr. John Genys, Professor Emeritus, U of MD, whom I collected seed for one time and had numerous conversations with about NS (he was a native of Lithuania), once told me that NS has been extensively planted in Europe for a very long time, with seed collected from one area planted in another area very frequently. He said that this made the idea that when one collects from a given area that one is getting a strain of trees that originated in that area somewhat uncertain.

But he also said that in spite of that, there was a rather good tendency for seed collected from the same area perform in a reasonably predictable manner. Anyway, I have a copy of one of the provenance trials he did, and notice that different batches of seed collected from essentially the same area, sometimes performed significantly differently. Of course this could reflect how the seed was collected--was there any effort to collect form the best trees, etc.? But it could also result from this "cross planting."

Also this "cross planting" or whatever the proper term is, would result in some extra diversity being introduced into the NS population in areas where some forest plantings were made from seed from some more or less distant source. And perhaps the seed that came to be used for my plantation could have had some element of that.

Anyway, I find NS especially beautiful/fascinating because of its diversity. And the extreme number of cultivars available also may indicate something about the "genetic playfulness" of the species.

--Spruce

Oh, while I am mentioning the diversity of the NS trees in one of the stands on my timberland, I should add that there were a fairly large number of really "different" trees. Most notably, there were several--maybe a dozen or more on 6 acres--"snake branch" types. I would have tried to save some of these, but when I bought the land these were already big enough to make them difficult to transplant, and I would have had to cut down too many nice forest-type spruce trees to give them the room they needed.

There were a number of other "different" growth forms mixed in, almost all of which were slower growing than the more "normal" trees, and so they are now just about all gone. Some of these were trees with radically weeping branchlets.

But I still have a couple of these more unusually growing trees, both unusual for their exaggerated weeping characteristics. I am not sure if either is special enough to be worth cloning, but they are fun to watch grow.

Anyway, my other spruce stands--one other fairly large one, and a couple of small ones, don't show this wild diversity. For example, I have not seen any of the "snake branch types in my other plantings.

Well, all this is more than most of you probably want to know about my NS groves, but I find it fascinating that this one stand--from whatever seed source (the man who planted it is dead now)--can show so much diversity.

Oh, just one more example--there was one NS tree that had very, very small, fine needles. In a way like Oriental spruce, but not with quite the same texture.

--Spruce

resin and anyone else interested:

I finally got up to my timberland and measured the large NS cones I collected from that tree I have that seems to produce unusually large cones. I have two, one is just short of 21 centimeters, and the other is 20 centemeters.

These are probably not the largest that tree produced last year. I originally collected about 8 that were the largest I could find under that tree, and placed them on the front porch in the sun to dry. But squirrels got to them. I then went back and got two more to keep safe. I suspect that the largest in the original batch were longer than the almost 21 centimeters of the one I still have.

--Spruce