Black Hills Spruce
Picea glauca var. densata
A dense, compact spruce that keeps a neat pyramid of blue-green needles to the ground without clipping, a fine lawn specimen, screen or windbreak. It's very cold-hardy, grows in a wide range of soils and does best where winters are cold and summers cool.
- Mature size
- 30 × 12 ft
- 9 × 4 m, tall × wide
- Hardiness
- Zones 3a–6b
- USDA
- Sun
- Full sun
- Water
- Medium to moist
Black Hills Spruce at its mature size
A mature Black Hills Spruce grows 20 to 40 feet tall and 10 to 15 feet wide, taller than most people.
Drawn to scale beside a 5 ft 9 in person. With VeraScape, you see it at this size in your own yard.
Typical mature size, unpruned. Sources: The Tree Center, The Morton Arboretum.
Through the year
What Black Hills Spruce looks like month by month in a typical zone 6–7 garden.
In leaf · Year-round
Short stiff dark green needles in a dense cone.
Growing Black Hills Spruce
- Grows well in
- The Northeast, the Midwest, and the Plains and Mountain West.
- Good for
- Privacy screen, hedge, specimen, and deer resistant
- Leaves
- Evergreen
- Native to
- Black Hills (South Dakota)
Spacing for a hedge
VeraScape spaces plants so their grown canopies just touch. For Black Hills Spruce, that’s about 12 ft apart, center to center.
Place a row in your own yard and VeraScape spaces them at their mature width, so you can see whether they’ll crowd the walk.
See Black Hills Spruce in your yard before you dig
Visualize it at its true size, alongside the rest of your design.
Other spruces
Dwarf Alberta SpruceBlack Hills Spruce
Colorado Blue Spruce
White SpruceAll drawn to the same scale.