Right on fella's thanks. The only reason I didn't plant it as a centerpiece tree near my home (had a P.schrenkiana) in a near-spot (fail to wet feet) - is I know someday people will come along and say, ooh ahh beautiful conifer and then walk away bleeding. She's just up the hill though and a sort of centerpiece-still. Dax

I finally made the "cone collection" trip yesterday and should be able to extract a sufficient amount of seed even with a low yield from the 149 cones collected. Johnny

I'm beginning to think that all rooted/grafted plants are on a gradient/sliding scale of how long and how much work it takes to re-establish apical dominance. But isn't it true that all of them eventually do, except the Araucarias? I seem to recall either reading or having David Parks (owner of Camellia Forest) tell me it would take years for cutting grown Taiwania to normalize. As I've posted before, too, I think some of the goofy issues with bad form/low branching seen in plants as diverse as hollies and magnolias is really because of asexual reproduction. For a conifer example, my 'Sekkan Sugi' produced annoying waterspouts for the first 5 years. Finally now that it has a good columnar shape and is over 15' high it has stopped doing that.

Mmm, let's see, Picea torano aka Picea polita, but this Tigertail Spruce is not to be confused with Picea bicolor 'Howells' Dwarf Tigertail aka Picea alcoquiana 'Howell's Dwarf. Wait, what? Anyhow, yours looks very healthy on that sloped site. I've been waiting for an extra blue selection of P. meyeri to hit the market, but nothing so far.