Should I remove or save my norway spruce?
Norway Spruce isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. This is the spruce that actually works in Indiana — Purdue recommends it as the replacement when blue spruce fails, because it carries real resistance to Rhizosphaera needle cast. The catch is scale: people plant it as "a spruce" on a quarter-acre lot and end up with a seventy-foot tree eight feet off the foundation.
How to tell which one you've got
Two patterns matter here: small branch tips browning and dying back inward, which Purdue has been seeing more of in submitted samples, and Cytospora canker, which is the real killer of 10-20 year old trees. Cytospora is diagnosable on site — the lowest branches die first and it climbs, with white to bluish resin crusted on the bark at the canker; a tree that is merely thin and off-color with no resin bleeding is stressed, one with dead lower whorls and resin streaks is being dismantled limb by limb.
The structural question
It handles ice better than most conifers its size, because flexible wood and drooping branchlets shed load rather than catching it, and the broad root plate keeps it upright. The failures you do see are whole-tree windthrow on saturated clay after a wet spring, and single large lower limbs tearing out at attachments a canker had already weakened.
Related
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- How does a norway spruce hold up in a storm?→
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