That is a tragic story, indeed! I have done this very procedure many times, so have courage. You can go about this two primary ways: the first is simply to repot the entire tree; the second is to cut off the healthy top and root it, and also repot and hope the trunk and rootmass survive. I think it is imperative that you use a free-draining potting mix. I use bark, perlite, lava rock, and just a little potting mix as a binder/moisture retentive ingredient. And when I say "a little potting mix," I mean less than 10% of the overall mix. If you can't mix your own, I recommend a fine-grade Orchid Mix, to which you will probably add some coarse Perlite. Repot keeping the roots moist at all times, thoroughly water and saturate the new mix when done, and place the tree in outdoor shade if available - no direct sun. Keep the mix uniformly moist with light waterings for at least a week after repotting. You can either repot the tree first, and the cut the top off....or you can cut the top off and repot the tree all at once. It's a bit of a gamble, as I don't know the vitality of the tree, but I have confidence from repeated experience that the top will root (if it is healthy as you describe). I place the cut top in a vase/jar of water, and I wait for white root primordia to appear. As soon as they appear, I transfer the cutting into a container of the same moist, free-draining mix, and I keep it moist while the cutting continues to root. I use #1 nursery containers.

Did the tree have weeping branchlets? Weeping a lot? I am not sure I can remember all the spruces I have seen and the bark color, so maybe this is not a positive ID for NS, but reddish, and very finely flaking reddish bark is typical of some NS trees at the age yours was, and is usually--maybe almost always--paired with a weeping habit. As for the foliage, there is a range of color variation in NS that I would not call exactly blue, but which one time caused a forester up here to confuse the more whitish colored NS with white spruce. Ah, the trees we have seen and "lost," or at least can't get back to see very easily. I remember one very remarkable NS tree I saw a few years ago--before I became interested in special cultivars. You won't believe this NS tree. It was in the back yard of a rural home where there was a country auction. The tree was very, very broadly pyramidal, and here is the amazing partthe side branches were very, very large and extended very much parallel to the ground with no sweep. This tree was probably about 28 inches in diameter, and the lower limbs that stretched out so amazingly horizontal were really, really thick and longthey must have been 8 inches, maybe one to two 10 inches in diameter. And they stretched outward for what must have been 20 feet or more. Can you picture this? It is hard, I know. I never saw anything like it before or since--nothing like it in a NS or any other tree, for that matter. Now where is this tree? I wish I knew. It was somewhere on a small back road north of US Route 40 where it crosses the line from MD into PA. Now that seems precise enough, but I could drive all those rural roads for a week and maybe not get back to that spot. Well, there are other special NS trees I have seen and think should be graftedmaybe I will find some excuse later to describe a couple more. --Spruce P.S. I am at my timberland now and spent the day thinning in my NS groves. Im back!! I havent felt so strong in a long time. I thought of you and your new NS groves. One day they will tower like minemaybe even more so. My spirit played and danced in the tops of these towering trees today, gliding among the high curtains of wonderful green weeping foliage!!

The tree farm owner-manager where (Central Oklahoma) we have purchased trees for the past 15 yrs. reports that they no longer carry the "Red Sunset" maple, due to the fact that the "Autumn Blaze" and "October Glory" varieties have superior growing habits, and display more reliable, as well as spectacular fall color in this area. Our "Red Sunset", planted in 2000, confirms that assessment. While being a healthy specimen with a dense round crown of branches and leaves, our "Red Sunset" has been inconsistent in producing good fall color. Conversely, our "Caddo Maple" and a neighbor's "Autumn Blaze" have produced amazing colors almost every year since they were planted some nine years ago. The "Caddo" tends to have a rounded crown, but the "Autumn Blaze" is more oval in shape. I have ordered two "Autumn Blaze"(2.5 inch)to be planted in the opposite ends of our backyard as soon as they become dormant (late November to early December).

Just know that you are not alone... we had a magnificent row of white pines (on our property but overhanging the street) butchered by a town employee, riding in the bucket of a front-end loader with a chainsaw. As they raised the bucket, crawling down my curb, he cut a line straight up to about 12 feet. All to accommodate the snowplow, which had not in all the previous years ever bothered to plow all the way to the curb anyway, but which all of a sudden was (so we were told) "endangered" by the white pine branches (I personally have never met a white pine branch that was any match for a multi-ton snowplow, but there you are...) Needless to say, this resulted in many letters, many complaints, intervention by the first selectman and a reprimand for the "nonprofessional" "pruning" by the town. The reprimand must have REALLY ticked off the Public Works director, because next thing I knew (literally -- 8 am the VERY next DAY!), he sics the power company on my trees. Says his crew saw "plain evidence of arc-ing" (which if true, would be dangerous, I agree): of course, the power company themselves had "pruned" (i.e., topped!) the trees less than a year before. Pure retribution as far as I could tell! One more tree story: In that same line of trees lining the street (and forming, when we bought our house, a virtually solid privacy wall!) was a magnificent elm. A real, American elm. We spent a fortune injecting it to protect it against Dutch elm disease, and it was flourishing (not necessarily because of that, of course, since we subsequently learned that there was significant question about the merit of such treatments. Nonetheless, we did them and they weren't cheap!) Then the power company's tree guy came to the door on one of their many visits to butcher (ooops, "prune") the white pines, to ask my permission, as they must. I said (reluctantly) okay, but prune as lightly as possible and leave the elm alone (since I didn't think any of its branches were impacting power lines and I didn't want any unnecessary pruning of this beautiful specimen). We walked out together, he agreed with me, and told (while I stood there) the crew to leave it alone. I looked at about two hours later to see them lifting the bucket up to the elm. I RACED down the drive, planted myself at the base of their truck, and shouted up to the guy in the bucket: "SORRY GUYS -- You're DONE here!" (Further discussion ensued, of course, but in the end, they left, grumbling about "people like you, lady...") And as for line-of-sight, don't even ASK about my magnificent forsythia that the town wanted to remove. Even when a police officer came by and agreed it did not impede line of sight, they still sent someone out to "prune" it back. So a lovely old fountain of gold that never bothered anyone was turned in five minutes into a round little gumdrop. The public works guy -- when I confronted him in tears -- said "gee, lady, it looks MUCH better don't you think??" -- to which I (sobbing) said "take it OUT! if you're going to do that to it!!" (To which HE said "I can't take it out, I'm not authorized to do that..." Your tax dollars at work... Which is all just to say that I SO feel your pain! The irony is that two years after we moved from that house, a former neighbor told me that ALL those big white pines (which DID lose branches like mad every storm!!) had been taken out by the town! The reason: the roots were growing into the sewer lines in the street. Thank goodness I wasn't still living there -- they'd have had to lock me up for the duration! Final bizarre note: After the front-end loader butchering incident, the town offered, in response to my squawks, to "underplant" the trees they had butchered the lower 10 feet of, to try to fill in and restore some of our privacy. So in their infinite wisdom, what do they suggest they are willing to plant UNDER these troublesome white pines that are apparently destroying their snowplows? WHITE PINE SEEDLINGS!!!!!