... ... ... ... ... oh you guys are hilarious ... ... ... ... anyway .... so i go to a friends in Cleveland ... he he says lets go to saybrook ... OH .... whatever ... so we drive for 1.5 hours ... and stop in to Al's place ... Al has a half dozen greenhouses out back ... all crushed from the record snowfalls that winter ... this was about 8 years ago ... its just a complete mess ... my wallet is stuffed [oh for the good old days] .... and i start picking out stuff .... never bought foo foo conifers before.. just a few of the old standards.. but man.. now i own 5 acres.. 4 of which are full sun.. and i need to cover some earth .... so i am going through the place.. picked out all kinds of stuff.. half with no tags .... but now i know they were very well known ... i keep asking him how much.. he wont answer .... just talking with jon ... so i get jon aside.. i'm like ... i need to know how much ... jon wont answer .. though my wallet is stuffed .... it's not that stuffed .... anyway.. after a glorious few hours .... i finally throw down the gauntlet ... and the guy wont take my money ... i'm like.. carp ... i should have picked more... lol ... so off we drive ... 20 new conifers in my possession ... we go around a few bends ... and down the road.. and jon takes me to girards ... where i actually buy another load ... and so it was done ... last year .. i bumped into Al F. .... at hosta college [yeah.. go figure on that] .... and told him he may as well been a heroin pusher.. and just knocked me down and injected me ... and gave me 5 more bags ..... that his generosity has cost me a LOT of money .... lol ... that man had a grin as wide as the grand canyon ... i think i will make this a new post about enabling.. turns out.. al does grafting for his son.. who married the daughter of the Girards ... go figure on all that ... have a good day ken

Whaas, no mail order since they always seem to be small. I got 'Taylor's Sunburst' at my local nursery. I actually had ordered a 5 ft Chamaecyparis 'Confucious' (from Iseli), but that then had 3 leaders, and I did not buy it, would have been too much trouble to cut out 2 leaders. At the same day I saw a row of those 'Taylor's Sunburst' with those yellow candles, and decided to buy one. I will let it grow slowly in that spot. I also had ordered and bought (and planted opposite to 'Taylor's Sunburst') a 7 ft Picea omorika 'Pendula Bruns'. Actually my brother lives very close to the Bruns nursery, a nice connection there for me. Bernd

Dax-I purchased one last spring. It was labeled "White Spruce 'Snake' (Picea glauca 'Fort Ann')". It is more Blue than it is Green, at least the new growth is. Older growth is more blueish green. Does that mean I have the engelmanni 'Snake' than? Does that mean the propagator has no idea what they have and is covering all the bases? In the spring rush I tagged it as engelmanni 'Snake' thinking that was what I bought, not bothering to read the tag any further. I took a picture of it yesterday. I'll see if I can figure out how to post pics this weekend. I believe Ken and I both got ours from the same place. Eliot

Spruces often grow in part shade in nature. They are mostly forest species not as sensitive to shade as most pines. But any specimen with heavy shade coming from nearby on one side will have its growth affected, being thinner there. And if you are going to be planting a non-dwarf curious form like P. abies f. virgata such an attention-grabbing curiosity needs to have a place where it can eventually become the dominant feature over a large space, as does the more than 78' tall one in Seattle's Volunteer Park*. The worm-like P. abies 'Inversa' can be seen 32'+ tall in Kubota Gardens Park. Photos of another one 52' high (1992) as well as a f. virgata in Volunteer Park (perhaps the same one already mentioned) can be seen on page 92 of Van Pelt, Champion Trees of Washington State (1996, University of Washington Press, Seattle). *As far as I know it is still there. It was a few years ago.