Blue spruce
species of plant
The blue spruce (Picea pungens), also commonly known as Colorado spruce or Colorado blue spruce, is a species of spruce tree native to North America in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. It is noted for its often strongly glaucous blue-green needles, and has therefore been used as an ornamental tree in many places far beyond its native range.
Description
In the wild, Picea pungens grows to as much as 50 meters (164 ft) in height, but more typically 30 m (98 ft) tall. When planted in parks and gardens it most often grows 9 to 18 m (30 to 60 ft) tall with a spread of 3 to 6 m (10 to 20 ft). It has scaly gray-brown bark with a slight amount of a cinnamon-red undertone on its trunk, not as rough as an Engelmann spruce. On older trees the trunk bark becomes deeply furrowed and scaly. The trunk diameter may reach as much as 1.5 m (4.9 ft). The root system is of the blue spruce is dense and compact, lacking a taproot.
Blue spruce is a conifer with a conical crown when young, but more open and irregular in shape as it becomes older. The stout branches grow out horizontally in well defined whorls, but lower branches droop downwards as trees age.
“Blue spruce” enters the record as species of plant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Blue, spruce and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q146025. The Library of Congress control number is sh2006003883. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blue spruce” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.