Tree of the Week for Oct. 21st-Oct 28th 2007: Pseudotsuga menziesii

Ah-harr, me hearties! Well, I've got a long one for ya this week, so I hope you have the stamina to take it all in. Enjoy!

Whelp, seeing as how this week a full two members of my audience - including the one person whom I know actually reads all the way through these miraculous Adventures each week - are out in Portland right now, it seemed fitting to me that I should focus my attentions on the tree most eblematic of the great, rugged temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest: Pseudostuga menziesii, the Douglas-Fir.

When I merely mention that name, by the way, you, my readers, in your rôle as Botanical Boyscouts, should feel stir within your bones a sense of awe, of humility in the face of the unendurable majesty of one of the mightiest and noblest organisms on the face of this round earth. In those great Northwestern forests, P. menziesii can reach heights well over 300 feet, and live to ages in excess of a millenium; the tallest living specimen, the Brummit fir (also known as the "Doerner Fir") measures some 329 feet (about 100 meters even) from its intersection with the ground to its highest peak, and has a diameter of 11 1/2 feet. This monster, this prodigy of nature, can be found outside the town of Roseburg, in southern Oregon just off of U.S. Route 5 (hint, hint, guys).

But though it may be found so near to Roseburg, the mighty Douglas-Fir is no rose! No, nor is it any sort of flowering plant. For the Douglas-Fir belongs to a lineage more ancient by far than the late-blooming (hah!) Angiosperms. The flowering plants first unfolded their buds to the sun in the Cretaceous period, some ninety million years ago; but at that time the Conifers (the Pinophyta or Coniferae, as they are variously known in the scientific world) had already been possesed of a history stretching back some 200 million years, to the end of the Carboniferous Period. And this Division of life's grand family has never produced any ignoble weedy herb, for all of its members are woody plants, trees or shrubs which build for themselves strong, sempiternal bones of minutely organized plastic.

I can hear you now, my readers, as you scream in incredulity when I claim that wood is made of plastic. After all, in common parlance the two are held almost as antonyms. But my statement is in fact true - though, admittedly, for a rather loosey-goosey definition of plastic. Plastic is, you see, a polymer of some given organic molecule, repeated over and over again in vast chains. Now wood, wood is similarly composed primarily of cellulose (which is organic, natch) molecules repeated over and over again in vast chains. Certainly, there are many differences between wood and synthetic plastics - not least of which being the radically different manufacturing process - but surely you, my Coniferous Cadets, can recognize the distinct similarities between the two substances revealed in the above all-too brief comparison.

Returning to my previous theme, though, the Conifers have, almost alone among the non-flowering trees, managed to not merely survive but even to flourish in these latter days of Oaks and Wheatgrass. The Cycads, Ginkgos, and Tree-Ferns are now reduced to miniscule remnants of their once awesome biodiversity; the Lycopods and the giant Horsetails are utterly extinct, and have been for many millions of years, for aeons upon aeons. But the Conifers adapt and endure, thriving in some of the globe's harshest climates. And though the Coniferous order contains within itself many clans, it is primarily due to a single family that the Conifers are such a common and well-known group in the Northern world. This family, this diverse family of unbelievable resourcefulness, is the Pinaceae, the Pine Clan. Under its needle-wreathed boughs, it encompasses all the world's pines, firs, spruce trees, true cedars, hemlocks, and larches. And, of course, the awesome Douglas-fir.

Though there has been little doubt that the Douglas-fir belongs among the Pine family (save for some early botanists who wanted to place it in the genus Sequoia, along with the mighty redwood, which lies in the Cupressaceae) its precise location within that family, and its precise relation to other members of that family, was for many years in much doubt. It had been variably grouped in the same genus as the firs, the spruces, the pines (tho' why the pines, I know not), and the hemlocks before finally, in 1867, being given its own elite genus Pseudotsuga (meaning "fake hemlock") by the french botanist Élie-Abel Carrière. But even this did not end the debate, for the genus is a complicated one, with divisions between species resting sometimes on the minutest of criteria. Indeed, the precise number of species within this genus is even still open to much doubt; while the generally accepted number is five, there are those who would place it as high as thirteen. We will stick with the generally accepted five, for the sake of both brevity and agreement with the widest scope of the scientific literature possible.

Of these five, there is only one species that we are considering today, and it is the prince of not only its genus, but also of its family, and perhaps (if certain legends of old are to be believed) of all the trees that grow on this green earth. This species is, as I'm sure I've mentioned once already, Pseudotsuga menziesii, pronounced roughly "sue-doe-t'sue-guh men-zee-see-aye". If you will bear with me for a few more sentences, I would like to round out this lengthy discussion of the plant's genealogy with the important fact that there are two seperate subspecies of P. menziesii, which are sometimes considered quite distinct species - and understandably enough, for they do each have a noticeably different character about them. These two species are the Coast Douglas-Fir, P. menziesii menziesii, and the Rocky Mountain Douglas-Fir, P. menziesii glauca. For the rest of this essay, we will be concentrating on the Coast Douglas-Fir, but we will not ignore the inland race, and give it its due.

Members of the genus Pseudotsuga can be most easily distinguished from all other coniferous trees by virtue of a certain unique characteristic of their cones, namely the long, three-pointed bracts that stick out from beneath its scales. Note that what I am referring to here, following the common usage among non-Botanists, as the "cone" of the tree is in reality merely the female cone, which is handsome, medium-sized, and not-too showy at its two to four inches in length.. The male cones of the tree - which produce the pollen grains that, after being set adrift into the air, relentlessly fuck the countless thousands of ovules of their female siblings - are smallish things, an inch in length at the very outside. Every spring, towards the end of March, they spew out their flying jizz ("Flying Jizz" - what a great name for a band!) which is borne by the treacherous skies to the sticky embrace of the female cones - sticky, for in the Spring, the young, virgin female cones are indeed coated in a resinous material which entraps the manly pollen. I shall note, to conclude this racy tale, that since Douglas-Firs are all hermaphroditic, it sometimes is the case that a male's pollen will end up locked in the womb of the lady cone on the branch right next to it! Once this voluptuous ritual has been accomplished, the seeds will mature underneath the female cone's scaly bosom until they are ripe a half-year later, in the Autumn. At this time, the entire cone drops to the ground, breaking open and scattering its contents.

Now, you two readers of mine fortunate enough to be spending this week in the state of Oregon may be wondering how you are to ascertain whether or not a given tree is a Douglas-Fir if it has already shed all its cones. Worry not, though, friends! The tree has other characteristics that may speak to you and tell you its name, if you will but pause to listen. Its needles, for example, are about an inch or so in length, and are soft to the touch, not pricking the grasping finger. They are typically a bright, light green color, though they can also be a darker green, or else actively yellow-green (which is more common among the Coastal subspecies) or bluish green (which is more common among the Inland subspecies). These needles have, upon their underside, two narrow whitish strands. These needles are arranged in spirals about the twigs of the tree, and at their base they narrow and twist a bit in a way that is rather characteristic. This narrowing and twisting gives their needles a little bit of an herbaceous stem, a phenomenon rare among the Pinaceae, and a good clew if ye need one. This is as opposed to, say, spruce needles, which are attached to the twig by a woody 'peg', or those of the True Firs (genus Abies), which bud straight out from the twig without any appreciable stem. Finally, if all this avails you not, you can look at the leaf scar of the needles, for it is raised slightly above the twig - though this raising should not be confused with the small woody cushions of the hemlock.

I am sorry if all of those very similar looking needles caused you any confusion, O reader. I, too, have oftentimes found the various abstruse differences between the needles of the diverse conifers rather confusing. But I found that experience proved as educational as it is oftentimes claimed to be, and I would suggest that you follow my advice. Go and find some trees whose identity (due to their clearly present cones, for example) is not at all in question, and study their needles for some time, keeping your mind on just those points listed above. You will develop in your brain a "search image", a model, which can be used to mark those items about the needle that are most important, most distinguishable, for comparison to future specimens. It will be, I assure you, time well spent, for it will allow you to hear the Douglas-Fir proclaim its name into the Western sky.

And, once again, what a name it is! What awe and majesty it possesses! I hinted, above, of certain old legends which, if true, would make the Douglas-Fir the Prince of Sylva. The story is this: Several times, during the end of the 19th and dawn of the 20th centuries, there were reports, from lumbermen, of the felling of Douglas-Firs of truly prodigious proportions. The tallest of these was, it was claimed, some 415 feet in height. Not only is this some ninety feet taller than the tallest Douglas-Fir now alive, it is even 35 feet taller than the tallest tree currently living on the entire globe, the Redwood of northern California known as Hyperion, who is 379 feet in height. Now, it is true that lumbermen are as full of tall tales as all adventurers, and love to exagerrate their successes, and so none of these reports are given full credence by the scientific community. But there is such a number of them, and they are so far above even the grandest claims made by redwood lumbermen (no lumberjack had ever claimed to have felled a redwood of more than 380 feet, the approximate height of the current champion) that it seems plausible that mayhap, in the days when the saw had not dug its teeth into the wood of this species, there were indeed giants more than 400 feet tall.

If this is in fact the case, then within the lifetime of our children there may well again be such titans, assuming always that the last remaining old-growth forests of Douglas-Fir are not clear-cut by the shortsighted. P. menziesii is not a fast growing tree by any standard, but neither is it some creeping, cautious thing that inches its way towards heaven. It grows at the perfectly respectable rate of a foot or so a year. That being said, at a foot a year, it still will take the Doerner tree 70 years to break 400 feet.

But, although the ancientest and hugest Douglas-Firs have doubtlessly been felled, the species as a whole is in no danger. Indeed, the massive logging operations undertaken in the pacific Northwest are precisely what has allowed the Douglas-Fir to conquer vast new lands for its empire. Despite its awesome grandeur, which would make one think that it prefers to grow in the oldest of old forests, P. menziesii is, like the White Ash discussed several weeks ago, a successor species. It loathes shade and darkness, and will fare poorly if not exposed to the full light of the sun. So in an older forest, where the forest floor is constantly in the shadow of the huge conifers that dominate the landscape, Douglas-Fir seedlings are seldom seen, and no new crop of this species will be had.

But once the ancient trees of an area are removed - either by fire, by windstorm, or by the hands of Man - P. menziesii's advantages come to the fore. Its thick bark makes it terribly resistant to fire, and it is also famed for its ability to withstand droughts. And though such disasters may have been rare in past centuries, the millenial lifespan of a Douglas-Fir means that an elder is able to wait patiently for such an event to occur. Once the disaster's over, the Douglas-Fir is more likely to be left standing than its less fire-resistant neighbors, and its children are able to sprout up into the sweet sunshine unrivalled by any other trees - and, given their hardiness, each of these seedlings are reasonably likely to survive and flourish, ensuring that this disturbed region of the forest will remain dominated by Pseudotsuga for many centuries to come.

Which means, if you can dig it, that the massive lumber-harvesting enterprises undertaken in the area over the past several hundred years have been something of a boon for the Douglas-Fir, at least in areas that have been left alone to heal since they first felt the blade of man. In the areas where less enlightened policies have held sway, and the old forests have not been allowed to regrow at all, obviously the Douglas-Fir, like all trees, is injured horribly by humanity's shortsightedness. But, in those areas given time to heal, P. menziesii has staged a comeback, and now dominates much greater sections of these forests than it did of old.

Furthermore, because of the excellence of its wood, it has been planted by long-sighted human foresters all over the globe. Hard, stiff, and durable, this wood finds one of its chiefest uses in construction, where its strength under all kinds of pressure is appreciated. It is turned into wharves, bridges, trestles, etc. Not one of those sissy trees used for mere decorative purposes, the brawny Douglas-fir even in death brags of its ability to support crushing loads without flinching. And it has, of course, escaped from its plantations in these far-off lands, and has conquered some colonies in lands as distant from its native home as New Zealand, Germany, England, and South Africa. In some of these places, the tree's hardiness has even made it a 'problem', as it does what it is programmed to do: grow in disturbed areas. Poorly managed native forests that have been clear-cut by loggers sometimes find themselves suddenly awash in a sea of strange foreign invaders, all too often including the mighty Douglas-Fir.

There is infinitely more that I could say about the Douglas-Fir, about its relations with animals, with the soil, with other plants, and with humans, but I shall restrain myself, so that I may at least claim not to be too exceedingly boring. Once again, I must apologize for the obscene length of my entry, but in my defense may I claim that I am merely luxuriating in a discussion of my absolute favorite tree. For of all the trees I have ever met, P. menziesii is the one I love best. It is a noble, majestic, and grandiose tree, that flourishes in the exotic coniferous and temperate rainforests of Columbia. And yet, far from being some vulnerable relic of ancient days, infinitely sensitive to the New World Order established by mankind, P. menziesii is a rugged survivor, not only capable of lasting for centuries but also opportunistically conquering new land wherever new land presents itself to be conquered. So, my Western friends who luxuriantly repose in the Conifer Kingdom, go out there and sing the praises of the Prince of the Forest, Pseudotsuga menziesii, the Douglas-fir!

Singing the praises of the Prince of the Forest since 1986,
--mark