The Douglas Fir tree (Pseudotsuga menziesii)

Today's post will be about the Douglas Fir tree.  The Latin name for this species is Pseudotsuga menziesii.  What a mouthful.  Thankfully, everyone [in Canada] seems to agree on just one name, Douglas fir, even though this tree is a pretender.  But we'll get into that below.  First, a photo of a Douglas fir.  

 

This particular tree is called Big Lonely Doug.  It was featured in a book called Big Lonely Doug by Harley Rustad.  It's a good read, should you choose to pick up a copy.

Here's a range map, courtesy of Wikipedia:

 

The interesting thing is that this map suggests that Douglas fir only grows naturally within BC and southwestern Alberta (within Canada).  However, although Douglas fir is planted very commonly in BC, we've also planted small amounts of this species on select projects in the Maritimes!  Of course, it's not suitable for all projects on the east coast, since it's not a naturalized tree.  But some of the east coast nurseries grow it.  While I was digging around to find any history of Douglas fir in the Maritimes, I discovered that there was a plantation made near Stanhope (PEI) that was still healthy in the 1960's, and even today there may be other stands on PEI in Melville and Brookdale.

Douglas fir has a rich history in western Canada, and has been a critical part of the forest industry due to its value as lumber.  While the tree was essentially unknown throughout most of North America in the 1800's, by the mid-20th century it had become known as "the world's premier industrial tree," taking the place of Eastern White Pine after all the old growth pine on the east coast had been decimated.

Douglas fir likes direct sunlight, but it is also shade-tolerant.  Because of this, it can be found in pure even-aged stands (usually after a wildfire or a commercial harvest), in uneven-age stands, and also in mixwood forests.  It is happy to co-exist among other species, especially hemlock, cedar, pine, larch, and even aspen.  It doesn't like to grow up with spruce trees though.  Maybe they get jealous of each other because of how straight and clean the trunks grow.

Douglas fir is considered to be a false fir.  The real firs are species in BC such as Amabilis, Subalpine, and Grand Fir (or Balsam fir in Alberta and central/eastern Canada).  Douglas fir is not a type of pine, spruce or hemlock either.  Douglas fir is its own thing.  The Latin family name (Pseudotsuga) means "false hemlock."

Being a conifer, the Douglas fir has needles instead of leaves.  Here's a photo of the needles on a bundle of seedlings:

Some people have problems differentiating between Douglas fir, true firs, and spruce trees.  That's not surprising.  At a quick glance, anyone who hasn't studied trees could easily be fooled.  But luckily, Nature has given Douglas fir a unique identifying feature for inexperienced silviculturalists:  Pointy buds!  The buds of the Douglas fir have a very distinct sharp point at the tip.  Here's a close-up photo, from Step By Step:

 

Here are a few Fun Facts about the Douglas fir:

1.  The Latin name for this tree (Pseudotsuga menziesii) is a nod to its "discoverer," Alexander Menzies (although of course the indigenous peoples lived with it for millennia before that).  And Douglas refers to David Douglas, a Scottish botanist who introduced the tree to Europe.

2.  Douglas fir is a deep-rooted species.  However, the taproot usually achieves more than 50% of its final depth within just the first five years of growth!

3.  The US Navy still has eight wooden ships in the active fleet (Avenger-class minesweepers) made out of ... you guessed it!  Douglas fir.

4.  An enormous Douglas fir was cut in Washington State in 1897 which measured 465 feet.  After it was cut, the New York Times called its destruction a "truly pitiable tale."  Indeed.  This tree was called the Nooksack Giant, if you'd like to dig into that bit of history.

The Douglas fir is a very noble tree.  The world needs more of them.

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan "Scooter" Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes.  If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them!  The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.

 

Creek Restoration Tree Planting in the Elephant Hill Fire, British Columbia

Our organization performed some creek restoration work in central British Columbia this past August (2021).  The work was done in an area in central British Columbia, in the Kamloops region, in an area that had burned during the Elephant Fire in 2017.

 

The Elephant Fire was an enormous wildfire that occurred in central BC in 2017.  By the time it was finished, it burned 191,865 hectares.  For our readers that understand acres, that's just shy of half a million acres.

To put that into perspective, the average amount of ground in BC burned by wildfires each year between 2010 and 2016 was less than the size of this single fire.  Stanley Park in Vancouver is 405 hectares, so this fire was the size of 473 Stanley Parks.  New York City's Central Park is 341 hectares, so this fire was the size of 562 Central Parks.

Here's a graphic (courtesy of NASA) that shows the location of our project.  This satellite imagery was taken on August 22nd, 2017, while the fire was still active.  Note that North is not quite vertically oriented to the top of the map:

 

And for those of you who are unfamiliar with Clinton or Cache Creek, they're in south central BC (alongside Highway 97), as can be seen in this graphic from Google Earth:

 

Various governments, NGO's, and corporations have been working hard for the past few years to help reforest this wildfire.  That work will continue for a few more years, due to the sheer size of the burn.  Tens of millions of trees will have eventually been planted by all of the various entities combined.

A lot of the work done to date has been concentrated on land parcels that were already established within the provincial forestry GIS system.  Some of these areas were never-harvested Old Growth Management Areas, and some were previously-harvested forestry cutblocks.  However, because the Forest and Range Practices Act of British Columbia prohibits logging alongside creeks and within stream buffers, the areas that have been replanted to date often exclude those important strips.  Unfortunately, the wildfire did not respect the same boundaries.  We now have a situation where a lot of forest creeks and streams now have no tree coverage, which is bad because these watershed features are the most important parts of local ecosystems.

Our goal for 2021 was to target some of those creek buffers, to help restore the vegetation belt.  The areas that we worked in [to date] were almost exclusively pure conifer stands before the fire, so even though we planted thousands of trees on this project, we limited this phase of the project purely to conifers.  Although we love to plant deciduous species on many of our projects, we also need to mimic nature, which informed the final prescription.  The conifers will also provide better shade opportunities in the late winter and early spring, moderating the severity of the spring freshet.  In future phases, however, our goal is to include cottonwoods, trembling aspen, birch, and rocky mountain maples.  And luckily, these species are all starting to regenerate naturally too, which is very helpful to the local watersheds.

 

 

What is especially unfortunate is that as large as this fire was, it was only the third-largest fire in British Columbia in 2017.  The Hanceville Fire and the Plateau fire were both significantly larger.

If you'd like to learn more about the Elephant Hill fire, here are several media articles:

thenarwhal.ca/bc-forest-fires-restoration-secwepemc

www.coastmountainnews.com/news/rancher-helps-find-cattle-in-elephant-hill-fire

wildfiretoday.com/2017/07/31/elephant-hill-fire-in-british-columbia-grows-to-194000-acres

www.coastmountainnews.com/news/2017-elephant-hill-wildfire-most-likely-cause-by-smoking-materials

www.kamloopsthisweek.com/local-news/foi-documents-offer-closer-look-at-cause-of-elephant-hill-wildfire-4445360

You can see more photos of our 2021 tree planting work in our public 2021 Planting Photos folder on Dropbox.

 

Thanks for reading!

- Jonathan Clark

www.replant-environmental.ca

Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests.  We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases.  We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world.  If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page.  Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!

To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website.  Thanks so much for your interest!

Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects.  Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.