Picea spinulosa

(Griffith) A. Henry 1906

Common names

Sikkim spruce; 西藏云杉 xu mi yunshan [Chinese]. Although one of its synonyms is Picea morindoides, the popular "Morinda spruce" is a common name for Picea smithiana.

Taxonomic notes

Syn.: Abies spinulosa Griffith 1847, Picea morindoides Rehder, P. spinulosa var. yatungensis Silba (Wu and Raven 1999).

Description

Trees to 60 m tall. Bark rough, flaking, scaly. Branchlets brownish yellow, turning gray in 2nd year, slender, glabrous. Leaves directed forward on upper side of branchlets, spreading on lower side, linear, broadly rhombic in cross section, 15-35×1.1-1.8 mm, slightly keeled on both surfaces, stomata in 5-7 lines on upper and 1-3 lines on lower surface (or is it the other way around?), apex acute or acuminate. Seed cones green, purple at margin of seed scales, maturing brown or dark brown, oblong-cylindric or cylindric, 9-11×3-4.5 cm. Seed scales obovate, thick, 20×18 mm, smooth and glossy, not striate. Seeds dark brown, 5 mm long, with an 11-15 mm wing (Wu and Raven 1999). See García Esteban et al. (2004) for a detailed characterization of the wood anatomy.

Distribution and Ecology

Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, SE Tibet, 2400-3600m (Silba 1986, Wu and Raven 1999). Hardy to Zone 8 (cold hardiness limit between -12.1°C and -6.7°C) (Bannister and Neuner 2001).

Remarkable Specimens

The oldest known living specimen, 720 years, was documented in a tree-ring chronology covering the period 1280-2013 (fully crossdated), collected at 3268 m elevation near the Bumthang-Lhuntse border in east-central Bhutan by Paul Krusic, Ed Cook, and Dorji Dukpa (doi.org/10.25921/7ch6-zf50). This site was used in a dendroclimatic temperature reconstruction (Krusic et al. 2015).

Ethnobotany

Observations

Remarks

The epithet means 'thorny'. Griffith (1847) unfortunately fails to say why; perhaps it is for the prickly foliage.

First collected on February 26, 1837 below the "Rodoola Pass" (elev. 12,500 ft; apparently somewhere in the Trashiyangtse District of eastern Bhutan) by W. Griffith, a remarkable botanist who collected over 12,000 species in his short life (Griffith 1847, Lang 1913).

Citations

Griffith, William. 1847. Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bootan, Afghanistan and the Neighbouring Countries. Calcutta: The Bishop's College Press. Available: Biodiversity Heritage Library, accessed 2020.11.28.

Henry, A. 1906. New or noteworthy plants. Gardeners' Chronicle ser. 3. 39:219. Available: Google Books, accessed 2010.12.21.

Krusic, P. J., E. R. Cook, D. Dukpa, A. Putnam, S. Rupper, and J. Schaefer. 2015. Six hundred thirty-eight years of summer temperature variability over the Bhutanese Himalaya. Geophysical Research Letters 42(8):2988-2994. doi: 10.1002/2015GL063566

Lang, W.H. 1913. William Griffith. Pp. 170-188 in F.W. Oliver (ed.), Makers of British Botany. Cambridge: The University Press. Pp. 178-191. Available at Google Books.

See also

Elwes and Henry 1906-1913 at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This series of volumes, privately printed, provides some of the most engaging descriptions of conifers ever published. Although they only treat species cultivated in the U.K. and Ireland, and the taxonomy is a bit dated, still these accounts are thorough, treating such topics as species description, range, varieties, exceptionally old or tall specimens, remarkable trees, and cultivation. Despite being over a century old, they are generally accurate, and are illustrated with some remarkable photographs and lithographs.