White spruce
Picea glauca
Also called Spruce
- Blackfoot
- Patakh'i
- Cree
- sihtaᓯᐦᑕ
- Cree
- iyinâhtikᐃᔨᓈᐦᑎᐠ
Know another name for this plant, or a different spelling? Tell us.
The spruce of the river valleys and the north. Spring tips are gathered for tea, the inner bark is food in a hard winter, and the pitch is used on the skin. Named in both Blackfoot and Cree.
Commonly shared knowledge. Learn it, gather it, and follow the protocol.
Take care
- Learn yew before you gather any conifer for tea. It is the one conifer here that can kill you.
What it is confused with
Deadly look-alikeYew Taxus species
Yew has flat, soft, dark green needles, pale beneath, and carries a red berry-like fruit instead of a cone. Nearly every part of it is seriously poisonous. If you see red fruit on a conifer, walk away.
Easily confusedSweet pine (subalpine fir) Abies lasiocarpa
Fir needles are flat and blunt and will not roll between your fingers; spruce needles are square and sharp and roll easily. Both are used, for different things, so it is worth being able to tell them apart.
How to know it
- Needles
- Sharp, stiff and four-sided. Roll one between finger and thumb and it turns easily. That rolling test separates every spruce from every fir.
- Twigs
- Rough with small peg-like stubs where old needles have fallen. Run a bare twig through your fingers and you can feel them.
- Cones
- Hang downward, papery, and drop off whole. Fir cones stand up and fall apart on the branch.
- Smell
- Sharp and resinous rather than sweet and citrus, which is how you tell it from sweet pine.
- Shape
- Narrow and pyramidal with branches whorled around the trunk.
The country it grows in
- Mountain forest
- Riverbanks and willow flats
- Foothills and shrubland
- Aspen parkland
Landscape types only. We do not publish where a patch is, and we are not going to.
When it is ready
- Needles and cones May to JuneThe bright new tips in spring, once they have pushed out of their brown husks. If the husk will not slip off, it is too early.
- Bark May to July
- Sap and pitch January to December
Right now it is July. Something on this plant is in season.
What it is used for
- Breathing and colds
- Skin and wounds
- Food and drink
- Tools and materials
Spring tips make a tea. The Montana guide records the inner bark as food that carried people through hard winters.
Pitch is used on cuts and on chapped skin, and to waterproof seams.
How it is prepared
- Tea
A tablespoon of dried needles to two cups of water, boiled then steeped about twenty minutes.
- Salve
Pitch warmed gently with fat makes a thick dressing for cracked skin.
Protocol
Ask the plant first, and offer something before you take anything. Tobacco is what is most often offered here. Say who you are, and say what the medicine is for.
Harvest the mature plants and leave the small ones to grow. Never take the first plant you find, and never take all of them.
Take only what you will actually use. Medicine picked and then left to rot in a bag was taken for nothing.
Leave the ground as you found it. Put back any dirt you dug up, and return any plant material you do not use to the earth.
Do not gather beside roads, highways or trails, where the plants take up whatever has been sprayed or spilled there.
If you are not certain what a plant is, do not pick it and do not put it in your mouth. Ask someone. Being wrong in the field is how people get hurt.
Take a few tips from many trees rather than stripping one, and never take the leader at the very top. Never ring a tree by taking bark all the way around it; that kills it.