Every Spruce in Spokane (and Why Norway Spruce Was Hiding)

Norway spruce has been in the index since the beginning. You wouldn't have known it from the app, because it was filed under Common Spruce.

So: a spruce audit. Every spruce you actually meet in Spokane should be in the index, under the name you'd type into the search bar. Nine are in now. Three were wearing the wrong name, and one was missing.

Three were named wrong

Trefle, the botanical database underneath the index, picks one primary common name per species. For three of the most-planted spruces here it picked one nobody uses.

Every old name stays on as an alias, so nothing that used to be findable stopped being findable.

Trefle also had "White Spruce" attached to all three of those species. In a tool you pull out to put a name on a tree, typing "white spruce" and getting a three-way tie is worse than useless. It resolves to Picea glauca alone now, which is what the name means in the trade.

One more: "Dwarf Alberta Spruce" matched nothing at all before, despite being the most-planted spruce form in Spokane yards. It's now an alias on Picea glauca, alongside "Black Hills Spruce".

One was missing

Picea orientalis, Oriental spruce. Not dropped, not excluded, just never there. It has the shortest needles of any spruce in cultivation, and the gold-foliaged 'Skylands' selection turns up in enough yards here to be worth knowing.

It's in now, with a full write-up but no photo yet. The image pipeline only takes license-verified photos from Wikimedia Commons, and I'd rather ship an entry bare than invent an attribution.

Brewer spruce and the rarer Asian spruces didn't make the cut. Collection trees, not Spokane trees.

The nine

The last three aren't Spokane trees. They stay for national coverage.