listen to the wind...

Moreover, if you have ever spent time talking wood with instrument makers in Germany, they will chuckle and tell you they consider "German spruce" not just a misnomer but an unlikelihood. They generally get their spruce from farther south, in Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland or France. This has always been the source of the best lutherie spruce. As Horst Grünert, a bass and cello maker in Penzberg, Bavaria, once cheerfully told me, he'd go right out with his chainsaw and get the rare spruce in Germany if he could find it, but he said that for all intents and purposes, it had been extinct in Germany for several centuries (again, see below). The spruce I was seeing all over the Alps was, he said, good for fence posts and pulp, and that's what it was farmed for. Outside of parks and so on, I never saw trees larger than about eight inches either. That's them in the above two photos.