Picea obovata
Siberian spruce | |
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Young Siberian spruce trees, Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug (Russia )
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Scientific classification | |
Kingdom: | Plantae |
Clade: | Tracheophytes |
Clade: | Gymnospermae |
Division: | Pinophyta |
Class: | Pinopsida |
Order: | Pinales |
Family: | Pinaceae |
Genus: | Picea |
Species: | P. obovata
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Binomial name | |
Picea obovata | |
Synonyms[2] | |
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Picea obovata, the Siberian spruce, is a
Description and uses
It is a medium-sized evergreen tree growing to 15–35 m tall, and with a trunk diameter of up to 1.5 m, and a conical crown with drooping branchlets. The shoots are orange-brown, with variably scattered to dense pubescence. The leaves are needle-like, 1–2 cm long, rhombic in cross-section, shiny green to grayish-green with inconspicuous stomatal lines; the leaves subtending a bud are distinctively angled out at a greater angle than the rest of the leaves (a character shared by only two or three other spruces). The cones are cylindric-conic, 5–10 cm long and 1.5–2 cm broad, green or purple, maturing glossy brown 4–6 months after pollination, and have stiff, smoothly rounded scales.
It is an important
Siberian spruce cone-scales are used as food by the
Due to their hardness and flexibility, planks made from untreated siberian spruce are the material of choice for the surfaces of modern world-class
Taxonomy and systematics
Siberian spruce and Norway spruce (Picea abies) have turned out to be extremely similar genetically and might be considered two closely related subspecies of P. abies.[3]
Siberian spruce hybridises extensively with Norway spruce where the two species (or subspecies) meet in northeastern Europe; trees over a broad area from extreme northeast Norway and Sweden, northern Finland east to the Ural Mountains are classified as the hybrid Picea × fennica (Regel) Komarov (or P. abies subsp. ×fennica, if the two taxa are considered subspecies); they differ from typical P. obovata from east of the Urals in having cones with less smoothly rounded, often triangular-pointed, scales.
References
- . Retrieved 19 November 2021.
- ^ Christopher J. Earle. "Picea obovata Ledeb. 1833". Gymnosperm Database. Retrieved 10 December 2014.
- .