Colorado Trees

While its name may evoke visions of the von Trapps singing their way through the Alps, the Austrian pine is most widespread in the higher regions of the Adriatic coast and Turkey. As for Austria, it’s found in the westernmost Alps near the Swiss and Italian borders. A western subspecies also grows in the mountain regions of Spain and Morocco.
Also known as the black pine, it was widely imported to England and North America. An extremely rugged tree, Austrian pines were widely planted as windbreaks in the Dust Bowl areas of the 1930s where they continue to be popular as landscape trees as well. It has naturalized in southern parts of the US Midwest.

Are you envious of the beautiful fall colors of New England? Or do you just want a shade tree that will turn heads with a blaze of color when summer turns to fall? Then the Autumn Blaze Maple is the tree for you.

If you’re looking for a small tree to accent your low-maintenance landscape, the mountain mahogany is an excellent choice. Native to Colorado’s rocky slopes, when mature, it has an attractive, twisted appearance that some liken to the African savanna.

Bristlecone pines are tough customers. They grow where nothing else will and last for centuries. In fact, a Great Basin bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains has been calculated as being 5,067 years old, making it the oldest known individual tree on earth. Clonal colonies of plants and microorganisms can last for 10,000 or more years—the Pando colony of quaking aspens in Utah, for example—but when it comes to individual organisms, the bristlecone is champ.

The next time you check your 401k give a nod to the American sycamore. It was under the shade of one, also known as a buttonwood tree, that financiers gathered in New York City in 1792 to sign the Buttonwood Agreement, creating the New York Stock Exchange.

If you want a beautiful, exotic shade tree that’s a living fossil too, you might want to look at the gingko. Unique among existing trees, the gingko is a species apart. It has no living relatives, all others having disappeared over its 270-million-year history.

Want a hardy medium-size ornamental tree with a spring display of white, fragrant flowers? Then the Mayday tree might be the one for you.

Hoss and Little Joe may have roamed the Ponderosa in Nevada, but the Ponderosa pine is right at home along Colorado’s Front Range. In fact, it’s the most widely distributed pine in North America, covering vast areas of the western US including 2 million acres in Colorado. The Nature Conservancy considers it one of the five most iconic trees of the state. It plays a vital role in Colorado’s drinking water supply, especially in the heavily populated areas of the Front Range. Its thick foliage and carpet of needles hold snow and moisture, tempering runoff and making the Ponderosa pine a high priority for conservation and forest management.

You probably don’t think of the Colorado foothills when you think about harvesting maple syrup, but both natives and settlers collected the sugary sap of the Boxelder well into the 20th century. Plains tribes like the Pawnee, Cheyenne, and Sioux used the sap to make syrup, sugar and to flavor beverages. Southwestern tribes use the inner bark to make sugary winter food. Several tribes use the wood for bowls, utensils, charcoal and for ceremonial purposes.
Its soft, close-grained wood is generally unsuitable for commercial use.

The mountains of Colorado kept an arboreal secret for centuries until botanists identified a variety of blue spruce unique to the Rocky Mountains in 1862. Today, the Colorado blue spruce is one of the most popular ornamental and landscape conifer trees in North America. It’s also the official state tree of Colorado.