White Spruce
Picea glauca
A dense, pyramidal native spruce with short, soft needles, a fine screen, hedge or Christmas tree and one of the most tolerant spruces of wind, cold, drought and crowding. It needs cool summers, and pollution or salt spray set it back. Good air flow keeps mites away. Crushed needles smell skunky.
- Mature size
- 50 × 15 ft
- 15 × 4.5 m, tall × wide
- Hardiness
- Zones 2a–6b
- USDA
- Sun
- Full sun to part sun
- Water
- Dry to moist
White Spruce at its mature size
A mature White Spruce grows 40 to 60 feet tall and 10 to 20 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: NC State Extension.
Through the year
What White Spruce looks like month by month in a typical zone 6–7 garden.
In leaf · Year-round
Dense blue-green needles.
Photos
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Growing White Spruce
- Grows well in
- The Northeast, the Midwest, and the Plains and Mountain West.
- Growth rate
- Medium
- Good for
- Privacy screen, hedge, specimen, drought tolerant, and deer resistant
- Leaves
- Evergreen
- Native to
- Canada and Northern United States
Spacing for a hedge
VeraScape spaces plants so their grown canopies just touch. For White Spruce, that’s about 15 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 White Spruce in your yard before you dig
Visualize it at its true size, alongside the rest of your design.
Other spruces
Dwarf Alberta Spruce
Black Hills Spruce
Colorado Blue Spruce
White SpruceAll drawn to the same scale.