Douglas Fir. Stephen F. Arno
was already serving as the world’s preferred construction lumber. Douglas-fir was known by more than a dozen common names in the nineteenth century before an official name was finally agreed upon. Selecting a scientific name proved even more elusive. Much drama played out first, and many botanists’ dreams of naming the tree were dashed before an acceptable name was found.
Archibald Menzies, a botanist and surgeon who served as naturalist on an early British voyage to the Pacific Northwest, first collected a specimen of Douglas-fir twigs and needles (but no cones) on Vancouver Island in 1791. Menzies did not describe the tree in his journal at the time because he changed jobs when the ship’s surgeon fell ill, but Meriwether Lewis described Douglas-fir on his return trip up the Columbia River in 1806. Lewis referred to the specimen he collected as Fir No. 5, which included a written description of the foliage and cones and a drawing of the distinctive cone bract.
David Douglas, the botanist whose name would eventually be adopted for the tree’s common name, first arrived in America from Scotland in 1823. The prestige of his association with the Royal Horticultural Society of London opened doors to the finest botanists in the United States, and Douglas made good use of his enhanced access. The timing of his arrival could not have been better. In 1824 the Hudson’s Bay Company announced their plans to sponsor a plant collector along the Columbia River, and the young, welltrained Douglas was the natural choice. As a final step in getting ready for his new job in the Pacific Northwest, Douglas arranged to meet Archibald Menzies in London with high hopes of gathering some last-minute advice. When the two men met in the spring of 1824 for a chat over tea, little could they have imagined the role their names would play in the drawn-out process of selecting both a common and a scientific name for Douglas-fir.
Although still early in his career, the energetic and outgoing Douglas had quickly made a name for himself through his association with the Royal Horticultural Society and Hudson’s Bay Company, and his acquaintance with many big-name botanists of the time. On his first sponsored trip to the Pacific Northwest from 1824 to 1827, Douglas diligently collected specimens and seeds (including 120 pounds of Douglas-fir seed, equivalent to about three million seeds) from hundreds of plants and trees for later study, classification, and planting back home. His plant collection set a record for the number of species introduced by an individual into England, the leading country in botanical research at the time. Upon his return to London in the fall of 1827, Douglas was welcomed home as a celebrity. The prodigious amount of seeds that he sent or carried back to the Horticultural Society in London overwhelmed the capacity of their gardens for planting, requiring them to engage the help of private nurseries. Douglas-fir seedlings resulting from these efforts were widely distributed to public and private gardens across the United Kingdom. Some of the trees remaining from those early plantings now soar more than 200 feet tall; serendipitously, one such giant grows near Douglas’s birthplace in Scone, Scotland.
Given Douglas’s celebrity, it is not surprising that in 1833 the English publication Penny Cyclopaedia used the name “Douglas Fir” in its description of the species, honoring and acknowledging Douglas as the discoverer “of this gigantic species . . . found in immense forests in North-West America.” The Penny Cyclopaedia was a companion publication of the Penny Magazine, a weekly magazine that sold for a penny to make it widely available to the general public. Both publications were put out by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, whose altruistic intent was to educate the working class in Britain. The newly proposed name gained traction in Europe but became just one among many other names used in North America in the 1800s.
In 1909 the US Forest Service officially accepted “Douglas fir” as the agency’s preferred common name for the tree after a census of western lumbermen found that it was used more than all other names combined. But the search for a universally acceptable common name continued. Coastal loggers favored the name “red fir” because of the tree’s reddish heartwood, and many other names were also in use. As late as 1939, Yosemite naturalist James Cole observed, “These magnificent trees from the Northwest are somewhat of a botanical puzzle as indicated by their 28 common names.”
Given the hodgepodge of names for this tree that changed over time and place, difficulty in settling on “Douglas-fir” as the official common name is understandable. It wasn’t until 1950 that the hyphenated version of the name was formally adopted by the Seventh International Botanical Congress in Stockholm. Even today “Douglas fir”—two words—is more often used in the popular media (including in the title of this book) instead of the correct form, “Douglas-fir,” which implies that this distinctive tree is not actually a fir. James Reveal, an expert on the drawn-out process of naming Douglas-fir, found it ironic that the final choice perpetuated a twopart name that is incorrect on both sides of the hyphen. Reveal wryly noted that “This tree is not Douglas’s,” because someone else first described it scientifically, “and it is not a fir,” because the tree’s characteristics—such as hanging rather than upright cones and pointed rather than rounded buds—clearly fall outside the description of true firs.
Finding an acceptable scientific (Latin) name for the genus and species of Douglas-fir was even more challenging. Foliage collected by Menzies on Vancouver Island in 1791, plant collections and descriptions made by Lewis in 1806 along the Columbia, and plant materials collected by Douglas on his trips to the Northwest between 1824 and 1830 provided the basis for eighteen scientific names proposed for this species before a suitable name was found. No other North American conifer even comes close to Douglas-fir in terms of how many names were proposed and rejected before authorities agreed upon a valid name.
The quest began in 1803 when a British botanist named Lambert submitted the first Latin name for Douglas-fir, Pinus taxifolia, based on Menzies’s sample collected in 1791. The submission was rejected because the name had already been assigned to an entirely different conifer. Seventeen additional scientific names would be submitted over the next 150 years, sixteen of which were deemed invalid because the name had either already been used or did not meet international taxonomic rules. During this period, trees were found in the mountains of Southern California, Japan, and remote reaches of China that shared similarly distinctive cones and other physical characteristics with the widely distributed North American tree. In 1867 a French horticulturist named Carrière proposed putting these geographically dispersed but somewhat similar trees into a new genus, Pseudotsuga. By the latter 1800s most taxonomists accepted the new genus name, despite vigorous opposition from a few. One called it “a barbarous combination of the Greek word pseudo = false with the Japanese word tsuga = hemlock.” Another wrote, “One would expect that Pseudotsuga would resemble Tsuga most of all conifers, but Douglas-fir does resemble this genus least of all.” The choice of Pseudotsuga (“false hemlock”) as the new genus name was indeed puzzling, but the buds, needles, and number of chromosomes of this unusual tree kept it from being placed within existing genera such as pine (Pinus), spruce (Picea), or fir (Abies).
Despite acceptance of the genus name Pseudotsuga, attempts to find a suitable species name for this tree remained elusive. Finally, in 1950, Portuguese botanist J. A. F. Franco proposed the currently accepted scientific name for western North America’s common Douglas-fir: Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco, honoring Archibald Menzies. (The last name, Franco, identifies the person credited with authorship of the scientific name.) It may seem odd that a taxonomist from Portugal would break the impasse in naming an iconic American tree, but his successful effort is less of a fluke than it might seem. Franco was a distinguished European botanist, credited with authoring the name of 193 plant species over his illustrious fifty-six-year career. The newly proposed name avoided duplication of previously used names and was consistent with the international taxonomic framework for naming coniferous trees. Finally, Douglas-fir had acquired officially recognized common and scientific names. For centuries earlier, Salish peoples along the Northwest coast used the terms láyelhp and čebidac, among others, as names to identify these trees.
Douglas-fir’s genetic diversity, which exceeds that of its associates and nearly all other trees worldwide, accounts for some of its outstanding attributes and sets it apart as a singular species. It has thirteen pairs of chromosomes (called diploids) compared to only twelve pairs (or fewer) in virtually all other conifer species in the Northern