Spruce gum

 My maternal grandmother, who lived in Quebec, tipped me off to spruce gum,  which is spruce sap that has leaked from gashes in the tree bark and hardened on the surface into amber nuggets. It makes a good substitute chewing gum.

Well, I don’t know about the good part. It tastes like turpentine when you crunch it up in your mouth. But chew and chew and chew, and spit out the worst,  and it becomes gummy. 

You can’t stop chewing and hold the wad in your mouth or it will harden, like the resin it is, around your teeth. I quit chewing it when it began glomming to my fillings, threatening to pull them out.

My grandmother didn’t have a regular source of the gum, so I would take her a little baggie once in a while.  I pried the hard pellets from the trees with my Swiss Army knife. I don’t know if she ever actually chewed it, or just had a chuckle that I, short on Double Bubble, actually once in a while resorted to the spruce gum.

But the flavor wouldn’t have turned Gram off. She made a potion out of sweet flag (calamus root) and spooned it down as a cure for colds and headaches. Talk about a gacky taste....

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If you want to try spruce gum, hurry. Our spruce trees are dying. I recently noted to a neighbor that a tall tree on the property next beyond his was without needles. But that tree, he told me, had been struck by lightning.

Maybe that was the quicker, preferable way to go.

The browning spruce trees are suffering a fungal disease called rhizosphaera. It infects needles. Old needles pass it on to new needles, then fall off. The trees end up with fewer needles each year.

With fewer needles, the trees are slowly starved of sunlight. There are fewer needles to photosynthesize.

Native spruce trees favor colder climates north of us. But spruces have been imported and planted here for decades and are suffering the affliction.

Infected trees can be sprayed with a fungicide. But that requires prompt recognition of the disease, and the means to pay for spray.

You can still find in state forests stands of red spruce, planted by the Civilian Conservation Corpsmen in the 1930s. The idea was, the species grew quickly and could become a money crop.

The CCC closed shop by the time World War II broke out, and forest plantations were ignored. 

Many of these plantations were planted too tightly; the trees were choked after a couple dozen years. They were never thinned. Now the survivors have a new challenge.

 The writer is an associate editor of this newspaper.