Jezo Spruce (Picea jezoensis subsp. hondoensis)

The Jezo or Yezo Spruce is a large evergreen tree growing over 200 feet in the wild, but generally much shorter in cultivation. It is native to the mountains of central Japan and the mountains of the China-North Korea border and into Siberia.

The Jezo Spruce in the southwest corner of the Arboretum was planted by the Father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted about 1886. Olmsted obtained it from Dr. George Rogers Hall of Bristol, Rhode Island. Dr. Hall had been an American doctor in China. After he retired he introduced a wide assortment of Asian plants, to the United States beginning in 1862.

It is important in the Russian Far East and northern Japan, for timber and paper production. Much of what is cut is harvested unsustainably (and often illegally) from pristine natural forests. Rare in its native range, it is listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species^TM.

There are two geographical subspecies of this uncommon species, treated as varieties by some authors, and as distinct species by others:

• Picea jezoensis jezoensis is the more common throughout the native range.
• Picea jezoensis hondoensis is very rare and is known from isolated southern Japanese populations on high mountains in central Honshū.

For many years the Arboretum’s Jezo Spruce was believed to be the relatively more common Picea jezoensis. In 2015, Dr. Bryan Maynard, Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences and Entomology at the University of Rhode Island, evaluated the tree and determined that it was the much rarer subspecies, hondoensis. This is the largest Picea jezoensis subsp. hondoensis in Rhode Island any probably in the United States. In 2015 it was named a Helen Walker Raleigh State Champion Tree.

Rarely found in nurseries, Jezo Spruce is occasionally planted as an ornamental tree in large gardens.