Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Sorry to hear Alex64 passed away. It took me a while to remember him from the previous forum, but suddenly it all was here again. I remember he was doing recordings with his “dutch” granddaughter, so lovely.
So sorry. I liked him.
Matt — interesting, that abies glauca is sold as European spruce. Where? In America? Curious in double way, because its neither a spruce (its a “Tannenbaum”), nor is it European. It was brought from America to Europe, growing now in gardens and in plantations as chrismas trees, but never played a big role as a forest tree.
Unfortunately different names for the same tree, and the same name for different trees is historical reality. And accidents still happen. For example: Fazioli, an Italian piano manufacturer, uses spruce from South Tyrol, which is often called Rot-fichte there. And a clever translator translates their brochure into english, stating, that Fazioli uses red spruce, which is another tree from another continent — namely what you would call adirondack spruce.
Acid rain was a big problem in the eighties in middle Europe, but this is overcome now. Austrias forests (where 60% is spruce) are getting bigger and bigger.
If the spruce is German, Italian, Swiss, Austrian, alpine, carpathian, you can be sure, its all the same species – Picea abies – because there is no other endemic spruce in Europe. (Well, not entirely true, there is a very small area near Sarajevo, where Serbian spruce – Picea omorika – grows.) The differences, if any, come from the conditions, under which the trees are growing (temperatures, soil, amount of rainfall, sun hours per year, wind, etc.), and therefore the region of origin can say something about these conditions, though thats not sure at all. Even in the same region, e.g. the Alps, I could show you fast growing trees with huge late wood rings, and a few miles from there extremely slow growing trees with much more even wood, simply because one grows in the valley with rich soil and a long vegetation period, and the other in 1700 metres altitude on a stony northern slope, and water is frozen half of the year.
Moon spruce is kind of a funny brand name. Time for harvesting spruce trees for best quality is winter, thats common sense, but some people believe considering the moon phase also yields to better wood quality. I don’t know, for me its a bit too esoteric, and some scientific studies done on that matter say: no difference.
Andrea Florinett in Switzerland is one of those harvesting “moon spruce”. Anyway – if the moon helped sucking out the water and nutrients, or not – Florinett’s moon spruce comes from trees in high alpine altitudes, and is said to be superior quality. Here is more about moon spruce at Florinett’s website:
