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| 6/14/14 |
Moreno planted 5 on the long berm in spring ‘05.
Colorado Blue Spruce is actually not a good choice for here, they humid weather in summer is not good for them. They typically last only 10 years or so.
They were planted to form a screen between the house and the road that backs up to our property.
Initially they were planted with blue holly shrubs in between them, but the hollies quickly got crowded and had to come out.
They looked so tiny and far apart initially.
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| Here they were in Spring 2006 How could these little pyramids ever screen anything or form a wall of greenery? |
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| February 21, 2011 They are a presence in winter |
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| July 14, 2011 Starting to form a defining boundary and screen the road behind |
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| June 16, 2012 The addition of a wine colored redbud nearby makes the Colorado blue spruces pop |
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| 1/17/13 |
The two spruces on the far right got bare and open on the inside where they were crowded by the river birch and the holly. There was a lot of branch die off. It got worse each year, most noticeable from behind the berm.
It's not evident in my pictures, but the two on the right of the berm were really declining.
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| 10/24/13 |
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| 1/5/14 |
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| 9/27/14 |
Here's what Bert Cregg at The Garden Professors says!
Colorado blue spruce Picea pungens -The tree everyone loves to hate, yet we keep planting it. I suppose it’s the allure of the blue that people can’t resist. It’s like that bad boyfriend; you know he’ll do you wrong but… He’ll lure you in with those baby blues then start hanging out with those low-life Cooley adelgids, then hook up with rhizosphaera needlecast. And by the time the cytospora cankers start hanging out you know this relationship is going nowhere.
Margaret Roach has alternatives:
A better choice is Abies concolor [..... ] Unlike the Colorado blue spruce, the fir’s foliage is soft to the touch, far less stiff. It is also far less trouble-prone than the Colorado blue spruce, which if you’ve encountered a case of spruce gall or spider mites or the canker that can affect lower branches, you will know how disfiguring these issues can be. If you want a big blue pyramidal conifer in Zones 4-7 Concolor fir is it.
In late 2014 we had to take some out. Not all -- we left the three on the left side as a grouping, but took out the two that were struggling the most on the right side.
First, in spring the pyramidal hollies that had been planted in between each spruce all came out. They were crowding all the lower branches, and had gotten badly winter burned and we took them all out.
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| 4/28/14 - just before the winterburned hollies came out |
Even without the hollies crowding them, the spruce berm was getting a little too full. The two trees behind the river birch on the right were really shaded.
The lower branches had been disappearing for years, and were looking pretty bad.
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| 2014 - the last two on the right had quite a bit of branch dieback |
In December '14 the two on the right were taken down. Now there is a stand of only three Colorado Blue spruces remaining clustered on the left, which still looks good.
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| 12/14/14 |
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| 4/19/15 |
Now the leftmost spruce is declining, with a lot of dieback in the interior of its branches.
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| 1/5/17 |
