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Little Gem Norway Spruce – Tree Form

Picea abies 'Little Gem'

6 Reviews

Little Gem Norway Spruce – Tree Form

Picea abies 'Little Gem'

6 Reviews

This product is currently out of stock and unavailable.

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How are the heights measured?

All tree, and nothin' but the tree! We measure from the top of the soil to the top of the tree; the height of the container or the root system is never included in our measurements.

What is a gallon container?

Nursery containers come in a variety of different sizes, and old-school nursery slang has stuck. While the industry-standard terminology is to call the sizes "Gallon Containers", that doesn't exactly translate to the traditional liquid "gallon" size we think of. You'll find we carry young 1-gallons, up to more mature 7-gallons ranging anywhere from 6 inches to 6ft.

How does the delivery process work?

All of our orders ship via FedEx Ground! Once your order is placed online, our magic elves get right to work picking, staging, boxing and shipping your trees. Orders typically ship out within 2 business days. You will receive email notifications along the way on the progress of your order, as well as tracking information to track your plants all the way to their new home!

Why are some states excluded from shipping?

The short & sweet answer is: "United States Department of Agriculture Restrictions." Every state has their own unique USDA restrictions on which plants they allow to come into their state. While we wish we could serve everyone, it's for the safety of native species and helps prevent the spread of invasive disease & pests. We've gotta protect good ole' Mother Nature, after all.

About Me

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The Little Gem Spruce Tree is a wonder plant and a wonderful gift. It forms a perfect spherical evergreen form in rich green, on an upright trunk. The wonder is that it is naturally dwarf and never needs clipping, yet always look perfectly spherical and neat. It is the perfect answer for anyone who wants to add formal touches to their garden, perhaps at an entrance area, or along a walkway, but is afraid of all the clipping that is usually required. This is a tree that will grow in cold areas down to minus 30 degrees, and also grow well in warm and hot regions too. It should be planted in full sun for the best growth, with some midday shelter in very hot states. It will grow easily in most kinds of soil and is drought resistant when established.

  • The perfect way to get a formal look without needing to clip and clip
  • Showy yellow-green new shoots in spring
  • Grows in any sunny spot in any soil
  • Great rich-green evergreen makes a stunning accent plant
  • Trouble-free, cold hardy and drought resistant

For a great formal look with no work needed to achieve it, the Little Gem Spruce Tree has to be the number one choice. This tree makes a great gift for anyone with a taste for the formal but with a life that is too busy for all that clipping. Think of how perfect they would look planted as a pair on either side of a doorway to really give a touch of class to any home.

Plant Hardiness Zones 4-8
Mature Width 2
Mature Height 4
Sun Needs Full Sun
Zones 4-8

Gardens with a more formal feel have definitely come back into fashion, and formal touches add a lot to a more casual gardening style too. One of the formal details widely used is the clipped round ball on an upright trunk, which can be used to accent corners, create lines, or go into boxes beside doors and steps. The only problem with this feature is that the balls take a lot of clipping and care to look neat and smart, which is essential to get the ‘look’ right. So the perfect plant for this formal use would never need clipping. But hey, such a thing can’t exist, right? No, wrong! You can send as a gift tree to someone – maybe yourself – the perfect round-ball plant that will never need clipping and always look neat. It is the Little Gem Spruce Tree.

Now a spruce tree to most people sounds like a big forest tree, and that is correct. But the Little Gem Spruce is the exact opposite. It is one of Nature’s wonder; a dense, tiny plant that forms a perfect sphere that is never more than 2 feet across. Such special trees take skilled work to produce, so unfortunately they are always in short supply and often not available at all.

Growing Little Gem Norway Spruce Trees

So imagine – a plant that without any clipping will grow naturally into a ball that will never get too large. Our expert growers have mounted this amazing tree onto a sturdy trunk, so it is the perfect ‘lollipop tree’ – a spherical ball on a trunk that will never need clipping yet always look neat. This tree forms a dense cluster of short stems, covered in short needles, with the stems so closely-packed that they form a solid ball. The growth-rate is very uniform, so the ball just gets slowly larger, growing in all directions at the same rate and never sending up long shoots that need trimming. In spring the new growth is a yellow-green that almost looks like the ball is flowering. As summer comes the stems turn a deep green and stay that way all through winter too.

Hardiness

The Little Gem Spruce Tree is very hardy and will grow in every state, right across the country. It is especially useful in colder areas where the choice of plants is more limited. It should be planted in full sun in cooler areas and in partial shade in hot regions, where some shelter from the midday sun is beneficial. This tree is happy in most types of soil except the harshly alkaline and it will grow easily, without fuss and bother. When newly planted it should be kept well-watered, especially during the first summer, but once established it will survive periods of drought without problems.

Uses in Your Garden

Use the Little Gem Spruce Tree wherever you would like to have a formal ball. This could be on either side of an entrance, directly in the ground or in a pair of attractive pots. They could mark the corners of a flower bed, or give height above a bed or planter box, with flowering plants or lower-growing shrubs underneath. Use several to mark a walkway or give structure to any part of the garden. Place them in a circle around a fountain. Wherever a formal touch is needed, this is the ideal plant, because nobody needs to be out in the garden all the time clipping away to keep an unruly plant neat – Nature will do it for you and this tree will never look untidy.

History and Origins of the Little Gem Norway Spruce

This tree has an interesting history. The Norway spruce (Picea abies) grows naturally in Scandinavia, western Russia and the mountains of Europe. Although a handsome tree, it does not have enough special features to be grown much in gardens, but it is grown in large plantations as a source of soft-wood lumber. Very occasionally in some trees a strange thing happens. From a branch a tiny cluster of dwarf branches will grow, called a ‘witch’s broom’. Pieces of these tiny branches will produce tiny plants if correctly grown and several dwarf evergreens began this way.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, at a nursery outside Hamburg, Germany, this happened on a Norway spruce tree and the resulting plant, called the Bird’s Nest Spruce (P. abies ‘Nidiformis’), is a very popular and widely grown dwarf evergreen still today. However, although dwarf, it is not that small and many gardeners have been surprised when that cute little bush quickly grows into a plant 4 feet tall and 6 feet across – or even larger. Certainly it makes a beautiful specimen, but only if you have the room. The remarkable thing is that in the 1950’s, this time at the famous Grootendorst Nursery in the Netherlands, a witch’s broom developed on a Bird’s Nest Spruce and produced a truly miniature bush, a dwarf of a dwarf, we could say. This true dwarf is the Little Gem Spruce, which only grows between 1 and 2 feet across, making a round globe.

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Little Gem Norway Spruce – Tree Form

Picea abies 'Little Gem'

6 Reviews