Picea meyeri

Picea meyeri (Meyer's spruce; Chinese: 白杄; pinyin: báiqiān) is a species of spruce native to Nei Mongol in the northeast to Gansu in the southwest and also inhabiting Shanxi, Hebei and Shaanxi.

Picea meyeri
Picea meyeri
Conservation status
Near Threatened  (IUCN 3.1)[1]
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
Clade:	Tracheophytes
Clade:	Gymnosperms
Division:	Pinophyta
Class:	Pinopsida
Order:	Pinales
Family:	Pinaceae
Genus:	Picea
Species:	P. meyeri
Binomial name
Picea meyeri Rehder & E.H.Wilson

It is a medium-sized evergreen tree growing to 30 m tall, and with a trunk diameter of up to 0.8 m. The shoots are yellowish-brown, glabrous or with scattered pubescence. The leaves are needle-like, 13–25 mm long, rhombic in cross-section, bluish-green with conspicuous stomatal lines. The cones are cylindric, 7–11 cm long and 3 cm broad, maturing pale brown 5–7 months after pollination, and have stiff, smoothly rounded scales.

It is closely related to the dragon spruce from western China.

It is occasionally planted as an ornamental tree; its popularity is increasing in the eastern United States, where it is being used to replace Blue Spruce, which is more disease-prone in the humid climate there. The wood is similar to that of other spruces, but the species is too rare to be of economic value.