Photo: Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Black Spruce
Picea mariana
Also known as Bog Spruce, Swamp Spruce, Shortleaf Black Spruce
Key benefits
✦Traditional uses
✦Black spruce was a lifeline tree for Cree, Ojibwe, and other northern Indigenous peoples, who chewed the hardened resin as a traveling remedy for sore throats and steeped the young spring tips into a bright, citrusy tea. Early European settlers and sailors leaned on spruce tip tea and spruce beer through long winters, prizing it for the vitamin C it offered when fresh fruit was impossible to come by. The soft, sticky resin was also traditionally pressed onto cuts and scrapes as a natural seal, and its clean, resinous scent made it a household remedy for stuffy winter chests.
How to grow & use it
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- ✦Pine needle
- ✦Rosehip
- ✦Ginger
- ✦White spruce
- ✦Balsam fir
“For the bright green promise of spring caught in a needle, and a taste of the northern forest in winter.”
Sailors and settlers in the northern colonies brewed spruce beer specifically to fend off scurvy, since a single cup of spruce tip tea can hold more vitamin C than an orange.
Black spruce tips and resin are safe in the small amounts used for tea, though the resin and pollen can trigger allergic reactions in sensitive people. Avoid ingesting resin in large amounts, and only gather from correctly identified, unsprayed trees.