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Colorado Blue Spruce
likes moisture and is commonly found at the side of mountain streams and
on moist mountain sides.
Colorado Blue Spruce is
the state tree of Colorado and Utah and is found in magnificent stands in the mountainous parts of both
states and in the Rockies of Idaho, Arizona, and New Mexico. The
range of Colorado Blue Spruce is more limited than that of Engelmann
Spruce which reaches to the Pacific Coast and into western Canada.
Because of its beautiful
color and lovely symmetry, Colorado Blue Spruce is frequently planted as an
ornamental in many parts of North America. The ornamentals are bred
for the blue-green (not really "blue") color, often not present
in wild specimens. ( I have three, thirty-five year old Colorado
Blue Spruce on my property in Lewis, Colorado; they range in color from
dark green to partially blue-green. New growth is most likely to be
blue-green.)
Colorado
Blue Spruce and Engelmann Spruce are very similar and are often difficult
to tell apart. See the
top of the page for a
comparison of their characteristics. George
Engelmann, St. Louis doctor and highly respected botanist, named and
described Picea pungens in 1879. The first
authenticated collection of this tree is that by Charles Parry in 1862 on Pikes
Peak and Parry sent some of these collections to his friend Engelmann. (Click
to see this specimen in the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium.)
The
delay of about 17 years in assigning the Picea pungens name was due to an interesting story of
misidentification and more sophisticated classification of
Conifers. When Parry collected the specimen
in 1862 he and Engelmann considered it to be Abies menziesii. This name had been given by John Lindley in 1835 to the Pacific coast
giant Spruce trees, what we now call Sitka Spruce, Picea
sitchensis. Parry, Engelmann, and others of the time believed
that the Colorado Blue Spruce was the same as the Sitka Spruce and they thus
used the name Abies menziesii for Colorado Blue Spruce.* The
identification
of Colorado Blue Spruce as Sitka Spruce persisted into the
1870s. For instance,
Thomas Porter and John Coulter labeled the Colorado Blue Spruce specimen collected by
Parry (and specimens from other Colorado collectors) Abies menziesii
in the first ever flora of Colorado, their 1874 Synopsis of the Flora of Colorado. And
Townshend Brandegee, botanist to Ferdinand Hayden on the Hayden Expedition
across southern Colorado, identified the conifers
he found as Abies: he called Engelmann Spruce, Abies Engelmanni;
Sub-alpine Fir, Abies grandis; and Colorado Blue Spruce, Abies
Menziesii. (Capitalization and spelling is Brandegee's.) For
some reason Engelmann reviewed the naming of Colorado
Blue Spruce in the late 1870s. Perhaps Engelmann was prompted to
re-examine the name after he read that in 1855 the Sitka Spruce was
renamed Picea sitchensis by Elie Carriere in his book, Traité Général
des Conifères. Engelmann may also have been prompted to rename Abies
menziesii because in Carriere's revision of his book in 1867 he
proposed new divisions of Conifers including reassigning a number of Abies
species to the genus Picea. Engelmann
may have also come to realize that his description of the Colorado Blue
Spruce collected by Parry in 1862 just did not fit Lindley's description of the
Sitka Spruce. In September of 1874 Engelmann was in Colorado
and collected specimens of Colorado Blue Spruce; perhaps his personal
examination of the trees gave him a better understanding of their
characteristics and he realized they were not the same as Sitka Spruce and
that they belonged in the genus Picea not Abies. (Click
to see the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium specimen
of Colorado Blue Spruce that Engelmann collected in 1874. Notice the
tag in the lower left corner that tells us in Engelmann's handwriting that
he collected his specimens near Lindstrom, Colorado; that he believed the
tree grew no higher than 8,500 feet; and, most importantly for our present
discussion, that he still called the tree in question, Abies menziesii.) For
whatever reason, in 1879 Engelmann did rename this tree Picea pungens.** There
are more convolutions in the naming of two Spruces that Parry collected in
1862: Parry published two names for his Engelmann Spruce: Picea
engelmannii (May 4, 1863) and Abies engelmannii (May 4 and
October 31, 1863). Parry and Engelmann must have published
the Abies name because they believed their May 4, 1863 publication
of the name Picea engelmannii was in error.
Substantiating this supposition is that, as discussed above, Engelmann
named the other of the two tree species that Parry had collected, Abies
menziesii.
That
would explain why the botanical literature of the 1870s calls both plants
"Abies". In an email to me about the naming
of these two Spruce species, James Reveal indicates, "The concept of
what constituted a genus among the conifers was in a state of flux in
1863 and would only be resolved with Carriere's publication four years
later. No doubt Engelmann decided that Picea should be included
in Abies. (This was the view of many at the time)."
One
more piece in this puzzle: Colorado Blue Spruce and Engelmann Spruce are
very common Rocky Mountain trees. Colorado Blue Spruce is found
throughout the mountainous regions of the southern and central Rockies
and Engelmann Spruce ranges through all western states and into
Canada. How is it possible that previous explorers and botanists of
the mountain West (Meriwether Lewis, David Douglas, William Gambel, Edwin
James, Augustus Fendler, John Fremont, Ferdinand Hayden) missed these more than obvious
trees? Are there collections and names that have been overlooked? Part
of the answer to the above question came in an email exchange between
James Reveal, Stanley Welsh, and myself. Welsh is an expert on
Fremont's botanical collections (see his John Charles Fremont, Botanical
Explorer, available from Amazon) and he indicates that Fremont did
collect what came to be known as Picea engelmannii, nearly twenty
years before Parry collected it: "As to the Picea
specimen cited as engelmannii in my write-up of Fremont's collections, you
[James Reveal] have already noted that the Los Gatos [California] information on the
label, is wrong as to the year of collection, and it is also probably
wrong as to location [central California]. [Fremont's] label
information was open to question more likely than not, and he had probably
taken it [i.e., collected it] in 1845, but God knows where." Fremont collected for
John Torrey but the specimen in question apparently never made it to
Torrey, was never described, and thus was never credited to Fremont. The
naming of plants is often not a simple story. _______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________ *Lindley
honored Archibald Menzies (doctor, botanist, explorer) with the Abies
menziesii name. Coincidentally, the name had been used to honor
Menzies prior to Lindley, but Lindley did not know this. The name
was, however, used for a different
tree! The
first use was by Charles Mirbel in
1825 for what we now call Pseudotsuga menziesii, the Douglas Fir.
Mirbel's use of the Abies menziesii name apparently was not
widely publicized in 1825 or after that
and was unknown to botanists until it was rediscovered about 125 years
later. Lindley, Parry, Engelmann, and others never knew that the name
Abies menziesii had been applied to the Douglas Fir.
(The
naming of Douglas Fir is quite a contorted story in itself and is nicely told by James Reveal
on the Lewis
and Clark website.) **The genus name, Picea, was first given by Albert
Dietrich, Prussian botanist, teacher, and for the last twenty years of his
life, Curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Prussia. Dietrich
probably named this new genus in his 12 volume, 1833-1844, flora of
Prussia: Flora Regni Borussici. Flora des Königreichs Preussen oder
Abbildungen und Beschreibung der in Preussen wildwachsenden Pflanzen. (More
biographical information
about Parry and Engelmann.)
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