Colorado Trees

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.

From the mythical forests of Robin Hood to the parks of Denver, the majestic English oak has graced temperate climate landscapes for centuries. And centuries is a key word when talking about English oaks—they live for hundreds of years, especially when well cared for. The oldest living specimens are in Bulgaria and Lithuania, estimated to be around 1,500 years old.

When Spanish explorers reached the southern Rockies, they were greeted by a familiar sight. Large stands of short, bushy evergreen trees reminded them of the Stone Pines native to their homeland, so they called them by the same name—pino piñonero—a name they still go by today, albeit in a shortened form. And like its European cousin, the piñon, or pinyon, pine had been around for centuries, providing an important source of nutrition to ancient hunter-gatherer populations.

If you’re looking for a shade tree that a Denver city forester once described as being tough as a junkyard dog, take a look at the chinkapin oak. Sometimes spelled chinquapin, it’s a stately medium-size tree with a rounded canopy that’s native to the central midwestern US as far west as central Kansas and south into northeastern Mexico.

No tree is more closely associated with Colorado than the quaking aspen. Covering 5 million acres, the aspen is the state’s only widespread native deciduous tree.

If you want a large, stately shade tree for your landscape, consider the Heritage Oak. Oak trees come in a staggering variety of sizes and shapes and are one of the most widely distributed trees in North America with native growth in all of the lower 48 states.

Native to China, apricot trees can be grown successfully in Colorado at altitudes up to 6,500 feet. Depending on what you consider “success,” of course.