Flower:

Male and female flowers are cone like structures called strobili, both borne on the same tree at or near the tips of one year old branches. Male strobili are oblong cylindrical between 1/3 to just over ½ inch long, on a short stalk, initially red turning yellowish-brown. Female strobili are erect when young, egg shaped, about ½ inch long, and purple.

Leaves and bark:

Leaves are needle-like, dark green to bluish, single in a close spiral up the branch, ¼ to ½ inch long, squarish in cross section, the tip blunt and not sharp to the touch. The needles can persist up to 10 years.

Twigs are reddish brown with scattered short hairs, turning gray after several seasons with the fallen needles leaving raised roughish leaf scars.

The bark is thin and gray or brownish with flaky scales. Trunks can reach up to 19 inches in diameter at breast height (dbh).

Fruit:

Fruit is a brown, elliptic to egg-shaped cone, ½ to 1¼ inch long, hanging from the tips of twigs. Scales are rounded at the tip, with tiny, irregular teeth along the tip edge.

Notes:

Black Spruce shares its range with our native White Spruce (Picea glauca), which is a much larger, upland forest species with longer needles and larger cones. Black Spruce can survive in nutrient poor bogs that other species can't tolerate, forming larger pure stands of spindly, dwarfed trees. In more productive swamps it can be found mixed with Tamarack (Larix larcina), Northern White Cedar (Thuja occidentalis) and to a lesser extent Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea), but is easily distinguished from all these species by its short, squarish needles and small egg-shaped cones. While an important resource for the manufacturing of paper, for all intents and purposes, Black Spruce is rarely, if ever, used in landscape plantings. A highly destructive, albeit interesting, pest of Black Spruce is Dwarf Mistletoe (Arceuthobium pusillum), a parasitic flowering plant capable of causing extensive mortality in pure Black Spruce stands.