driveTREEmap – Tree 3

For the love of murals – come to Commercial Drive their everywhere!

Directions

Not far to go to the next featured tree, in fact just across the road. Here a majestic, sort-of fir tree awaits. You’ll see quite a lot of these in British Columbia as it is originally from around these parts. Our next featured tree: The Douglas-Fir.

A really super Douglas-Fir Tree

Douglas-Fir

Proper Name: Pseudotsuga menziesii
Common Name: Douglas-Fir, Coastal Douglas-Fir, Oregon Pine, Douglas Spruce

Description: A true NW American native, this evergreen tree if left can grow very tall indeed. It has solitary flat needles which have a lighter green underside to the darker coloured top. The bark is grey and smooth when young but when older it has deep orangey fissures. It’s not a true fir (hence the hypen!) because the cones do not sit upright on it’s branches but instead hang down.

Defining Feature: It has very distinctive three-forked bracts between the scales on its cones (see picture below). We think they look like a mouse’s back legs and tail. What do you think?

Cone ID

Take a close look, can you see the mice!

Name Roots

The common name commemorates David Douglas, a scottish botanist who sent the first seeds to Britain from Oregon in 1827. He suffered for his profession, getting ravished alive after falling erroneously into a bear trap. He was probably looking upwards at this monolithic plant at the time and not watching where he was going. He had by this point however greatly impacted the supply and acquisition of plants worldwide. Pseudotsuga means a pseudo Tsuga i.e it was considered at the time of naming to be a lot like a Tsuga (the scientific name for the Hemlock) but not quite. menziesii pays homage to another historical naturalist Archibald Menzies.

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