Picea polita (Sieb. & Zucc.) Carr.

One of Japan’s four endemic spruces, Picea polita is distributed on the Pacific side of Honshu, from Fukushima Prefecture south through the Japanese Alps and on the Kii Peninsula. It is also found on Shikoku and Kyushu, but is absent from that part of Honshu that lies to the west of Kyoto. It will colonise lava fields, as it does on the northern slope of Mount Fuji at the head of Lake Yamanaka where it has formed pure stands on the Takamarubi lava flow (a sight Wilson described as ‘unique and the most interesting thing of its kind that I saw in Japan’ – Wilson 1916) but generally it prefers better soils and it mainly occurs as a scattered component of the species-rich mixed conifer-broadleaf forest that characterise much of its distribution (Debreczy & Rácz 2011).

At its best Picea polita is also one of Japan’s largest-growing spruces, to 40 m tall (pers. obs. 2013) but very large trees have always been the exception rather than the rule, and taken with its scattered distribution this has prevented it from ever becoming an important timber tree (Elwes & Henry 1906–1913; Farjon 2017). Forests on accessible sites have been logged historically but it is unlikely that this species was ever deliberately targeted (Katsuki & Farjon 2019).

Like many other Japanes plants Picea polita was introduced to western cultivation by John Gould Veitch in 1861, closely followed by George Hall who introduced it to the United States in 1862 (Wilson 1916). It is not recorded where either man collected P. polita but the areas around Mount Fuji seem a strong possibility. Sargent would later collect it near Lake Chuzenji and Mayr on Mount Shirane; Wilson noted that, particularly in central Honshu, it was frequently met with in parks and gardens (Wilson 1916). On first being tested in western gardens P. polita was found to be completely hardy, but of very slow growth. Nevertheless it quickly became a staple of Victorian pineta in Britain and virtually all major collections and most large gardens here could soon boast at least one example of the so-called Tiger Tail Spruce. There have been different explanations for this name over the years: it has long been supposed that it is a reference to the distinctive and viciously sharp foliage (‘comparatively long, thick, rigid, spine-tipped leaves standing out at almost right angles to the shoot’ – Bean 1976) but as Richard Warren observed in his essay on spruces at the Arnold Arboretum ‘presumably [tiger tail] refers not to the sharpness of the [needles] but to the scratching one would get from grabbing it’ (Warren 1982). The name more likely references the unusual, elongated, sparsely-branched terminal branchlets of old trees in Japan, giving their crowns a whipcord (or tiger tail) like appearance (Debreczy & Rácz 2011).

W.J. Bean admired Picea polita for being ‘one of the most distinct and striking in the genus […] it is also one of the handsomest, and in a young state forms a shapely tree suitable for an isolated position on a lawn’ (Bean 1976). Many were planted in such positions but even by 1972 Alan Mitchell could not confirm any original trees in British or Irish collections (although he suspected examples at Pencarrow, Cornwall, and Linton Park, Kent) (Mitchell 1972). The best tree at Pencarrow has a long history of measurement: 15.2 m tall × 58 cm dbh in 1927; 24.4 m × 95 cm in 1970; 26.6 m × 1.19 m in 2022 (Mitchell 1972; Tree Register 2024). Other exceptional extant trees in Britain include 30 m × 79 cm in a private garden in Midhurst, West Sussex (‘bristling with health in 2018’); 27.7 m × 73 cm at Tregrehan, Cornwall, in 2024; and 26 m × 89 cm at Stourhead, Wiltshire, in 2021. There are many others, distributed across the length and bredth of the UK and Ireland, fairly evenly distributed across a size range from approximately 10 m tall to the aforementioned champions at Midhurst (height) and Pencarrow (girth) (Tree Register 2024). It is worth noting that this is perhaps the only spruce to thrive better in the warmer conditions of southern England than in the cooler north, where specimens always appear comparatively stunted (O. Johnson pers. comm. 2025).

The Veitch Nurseries dispatched material to the Arnold Arboretum in 1895. Earlier introductions by Hall, Sargent and others had persisted in American gardens up to this point, and Wilson mentions a specimen 19 m × 48 cm dbh on Hall’s estate near Boston (Wilson 1916). By 1982 two Veitch trees remained at the Arnold, and in 1987 these were vegetatively propagated; the originals are now 85 cm and 71 cm dbh respectively (Arnold Arboretum 2024).

Major collections in our area have sporadically targeted this species in recent years, somewhat opportunistically whilst engaged on general or otherwise targeted fieldwork in Japan. Few recent gatherings seem to have resulted in large numbers of plants, and as such this handsome species seems set, rather unfortunately, to remain a rarity of historic gardens and specialist collections.