Log for the fire rekindles thoughts of a true tree hero

I PUT a fresh log on the fire.

It burnt with a beautiful, clear flame and filled the room with a faint smell of resin. The timber was a present from a neighbour and it was well-seasoned Douglas fir.

This is one of the best softwood timbers to burn on an open fire and if it’s seasoned it doesn’t spark, unlike most softwoods. It also comes from a magnificent species of tree.

Douglas firs are native to the Pacific coast of Canada and the US. Although today the tallest tree in the world is a coastal redwood growing in northern California it seems that not long ago the record was held by a Douglas fir.

Today the tallest redwood is 112m, but logging records from Vancouver Island dating back about a century note the felling of several Douglas firs well in excess of this height — between 120 and 125m. All the big Douglas firs have been felled, though there are still a few groves of trees up to about 75 or 80m on Vancouver Island — the most famous is the Cathedral Grove.

The reason for this is the high quality of the timber which, confusingly, is usually known in the trade as ‘Oregon pine’. It’s so valuable that burning it is really a bit of a sacrilege, but my logs came from trees cleared from a building site that were too young to produce commercial timber.

As I sat by the fire I thought about one of my heroes, David Douglas, after whom the tree is named. He was the leading member of a small band of Scottish explorer/botanists whose tireless work has altered the countryside of Britain and Ireland. He didn’t actually discover the Douglas fir. Another Scot, Archibald Menzies, came across the tree in 1793. But Douglas went out and collected seed in 1827 and introduced the species to these islands.

He also introduced a lot of other important tree species, in fact probably more than any other single person, despite the fact that he died in an awful accident when he was only 35. Among them was Sitka spruce, which is the commonest tree in Ireland because it’s the main constituent of the forestry plantations in our uplands and boglands.

Another tree that Douglas discovered was the Monterey pine. This species is important because of its resistance to salt winds. It’s planted in shelter belts and an ornamental in exposed coastal districts, particularly in the south and west of the country.

Soon our streets and markets will be full of Christmas trees. As well as the traditional Norway spruce you’ll be offered ‘non-shed’ or ‘nobilis’ trees. This is the noble fir, which used to be called by the botanical name of Abies nobilis. Today the name is obsolete and it’s called Abies procera. It was also discovered by Douglas.

He came from humble origins and started work as a gardener’s boy at the age of 10. He was self-taught as a botanist, though he did work for a while at the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow. But he showed such promise that the Horticultural Society appointed him as their official collector in North America when he was in his 20s.

In 1834 he was collecting plants in the Sandwich Islands, the former name of Hawaii, when he fell into a pitfall trap that had been dug to catch feral cattle. Unfortunately there was already a bull in the trap and it gored him to death.

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