Taylor Swift, Time’s 2023 Person of the Year, needs no introduction.

While I may not be a Swiftie, I can appreciate Taylor’s taste in trees. She speaks enthusiastically about winter and one of its seasonal symbols, saying, “I love the scents of winter! For me it’s all about the feeling you get when you smell pumpkin spice, cinnamon, nutmeg, gingerbread and spruce.” Spruce is the proverbial Christmas tree, with artificial versions mimicking its shape and varieties serving as many a household’s holiday tree.

We don’t know if Taylor had a decorated spruce tree laden with beautiful ornaments, but by now, we may know whether she got all spruced up for a New Year’s Eve date with her new beau. Or if we don’t care about her social life, we can move on to the point: the sharp needles and conical shape of her favorite tree.

Spruce, from the genus picea, is a collection of approximately 35 species of evergreen trees. While some are native to our state, many are ornamental and can be found throughout the Commonwealth.

On the Island, one can locate Norway spruce and white spruce that were placed intentionally, either in residential developments or in the state forest where they were planted as a plantation tree for harvest. There are at least two roads here named for this tree, Spruce avenue in Oak Bluffs and Spruce Gate Road in Chilmark.

With two Vineyard roads named in their honor, they might have been more prevalent in the past. However, in 2002, the Gazette reported an aphid that preys upon and can kill spruce trees was identified on-Island and might have affected the local spruce population.

Known for its useful timber, spruce finds favor for indoor construction application. It is also valued as a tonewood, employed to construct soundboards for musical instruments. The Wright brothers’ first aircraft, called Flyer, was built of spruce and war planes in both world wars, including the British Mosquito, had substantial sitka spruce components in their manufacture. Another celebrity billionaire, Howard Hughes, built a prototype of a wooden cargo seaplane that was called The Spruce Goose by the press. But, alas, it was made of birch, not spruce.

Native people used spruce needles for tea and also used its roots as cord for basket weaving and stitching together canoes. They also valued it for medicine and chewed the pitch, making it likely the earliest documented version of chewing gum. It could be chewed and eaten, so no sticky residue was left.

Buds and needles from this tree were valued for their vitamin C content. Eighteenth-century British explorer Captain Cook made spruce beer for his crew to prevent scurvy. The buds could also be used as a spice or boiled with sugar to make spruce syrup.

The tree is not as big of a star as Taylor Swift, but has its own claim to fame. Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce in Sweden, is possibly the world’s oldest tree at 9,550 years old.

We can’t give Taylor the last words; those are for Henry David Thoreau — who also needs no introduction. He went deeper, knowing and appreciating the look, function and meaning, if not the smell, of spruce, when he shared that “the most primitive places left with us are the swamps, where the spruce still grows shaggy with usnea (lichen).”

Suzan Bellincampi is Islands director for Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown and the Nantucket Wildlife Sanctuaries. She is also the author of Martha’s Vineyard: A Field Guide to Island Nature and The Nature of Martha’s Vineyard.