If when you think of hiking here in the Pacific Northwest, you think of cool, dark, mysterious forests of huge conifers, you’ve got the right picture. The area made rainy by the mountains of the Pacific Northwest is the Conifer Capitol of the World, the only large temperate-zone area where conifers utterly overwhelm their broadleaf competitors. It grows conifers bigger than anywhere else, and the resulting tonnage of biomass and square footage of leaf area, per acre, is the world’s highest, even greater than in tropical rain forests.
Combined living and dead biomass translates directly to stored carbon, which can help to minimize climate change. Vegetation and the ocean are the two biggest carbon sinks (they absorb more carbon then they release), and the vegetation of Northwest and California coastal conifer forests does this best of all. If we are to get serious about offsetting carbon emissions, we should manage forests to maximize carbon storage.
Our conifers don’t just win growth contests against other trees when each grows in its native habitat, they also outgrow natives of similar climates when they’re planted in each other’s habitats. The superiority must be more in the trees’ genes than in our climate and soil. (Indeed, they seem to grow a little faster in New Zealand than here, and are becoming aggressively weedy there.) Sitka spruce, noble fir, and Douglas-fir have been heavily planted in Europe, New Zealand, and Chile for almost two centuries, whereas the Northwest’s tree farmers have had no reason to try nonnatives. One possible explanation is that European conifer genes were sabotaged by ten to twenty centuries of “high-grading”—logging the best trees and leaving the rest to perpetuate the forest. (High-grading ruled here, too, but only for only a century or so.) Also, our climate may have nurtured the cream of the crop by selecting trees that handle both huge snow loads in winter and, actually, drought in summer.
It’s when the rain falls that makes our region unique. Generally, wet temperate climates on this planet either supply rainfall throughout the year or concentrate it in the warmer months. Here, summer brings low humidity and frequent drought, so severe for weeks at a time that conifers and broadleaf trees alike close their leaf pores, shutting down photosynthesis to reduce water loss through open pores. For a deciduous broadleaf tree, whose activity is confined to the half-year when it has leaves, this is a great handicap. Our evergreen conifers, in contrast, get more than half their photosynthesis done during spring, fall, and even winter, when sunlight and temperature are limiting but moisture is not.
Nutrient uptake during the cooler seasons is similarly crucial, since summer drought shuts down the decay activities that liberate nutrients. Evergreen conifers, though slower than flowering trees in acquiring nutrients, acquire them all year long. They also deploy them efficiently, retaining their needles rather than jettisoning them each growing season.
Sheer size is an advantage here, providing ample storage space for water through summer. In many other regions, typhoons and hurricanes blow through often enough to make the genes for great height and longevity just about pointless. (Even here, the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 killed more trees than any one fire in historical time.)
Lots of popular trails here visit stands whose older trees are older than 400 years. We call them “ancient forest,” yet as a forest community type they are barely out of diapers; they are not the product of millions of years of genetic refinement coevolving in situ. The best estimates say that forests just like our ancient forests have only existed for 3000 to 6000 years. Before the last Ice Age ended 14,000 years ago, our region was too cold for today’s giant conifers; it had forests resembling those in the northern Rockies today. Then for 5000 years it may have been too warm for them; much of the west-side saw frequent fires and supported relatively sparse forests with a lot of alder and even oak. The Georgia-Puget-Willamette Trough held great oak savannas.
Development of the forest community hinged on twists of climate. Ancient forests south of the Olympics largely originated from the ashes of fires between 1448 and 1625. We speculate that that period had dry summers with prolonged strong east winds, to allow so much fire spread. Coastal ancient forests of British Columbia look similar but have much less Douglas-fir, because of the infrequency of fire. These stands developed during a cooler time, the Little Ace Age.
Conifer is a common name for a group of related trees and shrubs, many (but not all) of which bear needlelike leaves and woody cones. (They were formerly treated as a phylum, but botanical systematists today are inclined to either demote the broadest taxa or just call them “clades” without ranking them.) The largest family of conifers, the pine family (Pinaceae, p. 54–77, 79–89) bears both needles and cones. The yew family (p. 78) has needles but carries its seeds singly, in juicy berrylike orbs. The cypress family (Cupressaceae, p. 90–99) has small cones ranging to dry, mealy berries, and has sprays of short, crowded, usually scalelike leaves. Outside of the Northwest there are additional conifer families.
Conifers produce resin, or pitch, a viscous blend of aromatic volatiles (terpenes) evolved as a defense against herbivores and pathogenic fungi. Sticky pitch oozes into holes made by insect larvae, to clog them and trap the larvae, or into the wood near wounds in the bark, to resist fungal attack. Resins provide the aromas of conifer needles and bark. Don’t confuse pitch with sap, the water-based, often sugary liquid that serves the circulatory systems of all kinds of plants. Broadleaf trees rarely have pitch; conifers have both. The pine family is pitchier than the cypress family, which evolved an additional class of volatiles that do an even better job of resisting insects and fungi (p. 92).
All conifers are woody, that is, they are trees or shrubs. They produce true seeds by sexual fertilization, but they lack true flowers. The young cones are the female flower counterparts, receiving airborne pollen from small male staminate cones. Seed plants other than conifers are flowering plants or angiosperms.
Confusion abounds in the many terms for conifers and flowering plants. Flowering trees and shrubs are called broadleaf, even though a few, like heather, have needle-thin leaves while some conifers, like the bunya-bunya, have rather broad ones. To a forester or a lumberman, conifers are softwoods—even those few that are very hard, like yew. Evergreen and its opposite, deciduous, refer to whether the foliage remains alive through more than one growing season; people tend to think of them as synonymous with conifer and broadleaf, but in fact there are several deciduous conifers, like larch, and a great many broadleaf evergreens, like madrona.
Forest fire is the prevalent disturbance type that hits forests from the Cascade Crest eastward all across the Rocky Mountains, and in California. That generalization fits pretty well west of the crests as well, but less so northward, becoming untrue in most of coastal British Columbia. That transition into nearly fire-free forests raises interesting questions, especially because it will likely be in play as climate warms.
For a background on fire, look first at our east-side and the Rockies, a fire-ruled ecosystem. Each tree species has a fire strategy. Pines and larches have remarkable and varied strategies, from the fireproof bark of larch and ponderosa monarchs to the uncanny reseeding methods of lodgepole and whitebark pines. Western larch and ponderosa pine are adapted to frequent, low-intensity fires confined mostly to the understory. Individual trees may survive for three to seven centuries, their lower trunks bearing many scars that record a fire history we can read in the tree rings.
In contrast, when fire strikes stands of lodgepole pine, subalpine fir, grand fir, or Engelmann spruce, most are killed right through their thin bark, or when fire climbs into the branches and torches the trees. These are stand-replacing or high-severity fires. In typical forests of those species, all of the trees are roughly the same age, dating from a few years after the last fire. So those low-severity, low-density stands of ponderosa are actually outnumbered (even east of the crests) by denser forests prone to high-severity fire—and more so today than 150 years ago, when parklike ponderosa stands were more extensive (p. 80).
It’s really the forest, more than the climate or the site, that determines fire severity. (Fire severity is a measure of the percentage of overstory trees killed; intensity is a measure of fire heat and height.) A particular site might happen to get seeded with lodgepole pines and soon be prone to high-severity fire, or it might get densely stocked with ponderosa pines, with the same result. That’s right: ponderosa pines aren’t fire-resistant until they mature, and they also need to be spaced apart from each other and from other small trees that can carry flame into the canopy. Achieving that condition takes more than a century, plus a lot of luck. Once reached, it may sustain itself indefinitely, but not perfectly.
If you look at them on a broad enough scale, most fires are mixed-severity because fires are patchy. Ferocious fires skip over some unburned patches; and at the other extreme the tamest ground fires torch or kill a clump of trees here and there. (The strongest determinants of fire type and fire patches—even more than what kind of trees grow there—are weather and the quantity and moisture content of the fuels.)
When you walk through a recent burn, look at the needles to see the patches. In some patches, the needles are still green, on the tree, while the low vegetation may have burned or may have been skipped over. In others, brown needles carpet the ground: that’s a somewhat hotter ground fire. It burned hot enough to kill the trees but not high enough to consume the needles, which fell after things cooled down. Sometimes the dead trees’ bark is barely even scorched, as it doesn’t take much heat to kill our fire-sensitive species. In other patches—after a crown fire (one that spreads from treetop to treetop)—needles have vanished, along with fine twigs on the branches. And in some patches the trees are reduced to black snags. That was a very intense crown fire. Living tree trunks have too much water in them to burn up, but if intense fire returns years later it may consume the snags.
Six years after a fire in the Olympics.
At its most intense, the Biscuit Fire in southwest Oregon created firestorms that left patches of ground looking like a gravel parking lot. Not only was the organic matter near the soil surface vaporized, but the fine mineral soil near the surface was sucked out, vacuumed sky-high, and carried off. It’s hard to see that level of intensity as anything but destructive. Some burns have failed to regenerate forest vegetation even after many decades. Where a site favorable for forest growth turns, in the course of climate change, into one more suited for chaparral or grassland, that regime shift is likely to wait for a fire to trigger it.
Up until now, though, the great majority of fires were ecologically beneficial. The 1988 Yellowstone fires certainly were.
Shortly after fire the ground looks barren, but within a few years the area may be much brighter green than before the fire. If you come the summer after a fire, check whether the green coming up consists of herbs that seeded in or of shrubs or perennial herbs whose underground parts survived. Seeds themselves can be adapted to travel into the burn on wind or fur or feces, or to wait in the soil for decades without spoiling, and then germinate after they’ve felt the high heat of a fire.
The pioneer plants’ shade and transpiration make new microclimates; their roots, in symbiosis with fungi and bacteria, improve the soil physically and chemically; fast-growing annuals donate their corpses to the humus fund; perennials and shrubs contribute leaves; and forest succession is underway.
Over the past half-century, fire seems to have touched easily half of the forest acreage on the east slope of the Cascades. The west-side is a different story: hiking in the moist west-side forests, we don’t see many recent burns. (By “moist” I mean to exclude the somewhat drier west-side forests south of the Mackenzie River and in eastern parts of coastal ranges.) This large area stayed 99 percent green while much of the West went up in smoke. These forests are moist enough that fires can usually be put out before they get big.
Enormous fires did burn on the west-side between 1849 and 1951. Most were human-caused, and several hit areas made more flammable by recent clearcutting. Long before that, there were extensive fires between 1448 and 1625, followed by two centuries with less fire (allowing the post-fire generations to grow into old-growth forests). Whereas post-1850 fires were described in writing at the time, the older ones have to be teased out from tree rings and bits of charcoal, leaving us less sure of what they were like. Until recently they were thought to be vast stand-replacing fires like the post-1850 ones. Closer study finds instead that there were countless smaller fires and patchy fires that left many canopy trees green.
The oldest Douglas-fir cohort in a typical old forest embraces a 30- to 100-year age range, suggesting either that regrowth was broken up by more fires in close succession, or that broadleaf trees partially held firs at bay for many decades—or both.
Another question about fires before 1850 is whether they were caused by lightning or Native Americans. Scientists argue over this, and timber politics seem to cloud some of the thinking. It was probably both. The northern Coast Range is one of the least lightning-prone regions in the lower 48, but lightning does spark a fire there occasionally. The region’s Indians, on the other hand, set countless fires to manage vegetation. Specific purposes here included promoting growth of plant species for human consumption (huckleberries); enhancing the yield of the desired plant parts (beargrass) or the ease of collecting them; promoting deer and elk forage; and simply maintaining prairie because they liked it. They preferred to set fires in spring or early summer, when fires were less likely to grow huge.
Farther north, the rainy Olympic Peninsula had at least some fires: Indians maintained prairies, and a long-term fire study in the lower mountains found fine charcoal deposited fairly regularly for the past 13,700 years. But within the rainforest valleys, fires—including the only recent ones, Paradise in 2015 and Hoh in 1978—occur mainly on the south-facing slopes. (The Paradise Fire persisted for months, most of the time in the form of mosses and lichens smoldering and flaring. Few conifers caught fire, but many did die. Initial observations suggest they were killed where fire in the duff layer burned their roots, or fire in the canopy epiphytes cooked their needles.) The deep east-west valleys hold fog in and keep sun out, and the valley floors may not have burned for a thousand years. Vancouver Island’s wet side and the British Columbia fjord lands extend that pattern: low sun, steep topography, fog, and heavy precipitation whose summer component increases northward, all resulting in forests whose main disturbances are wind and rot, and fire only on some south-facing slopes.
Since 1950, the trend among forest ecologists has been to view fire as our friend, and to learn to use it as a management tool. They agree broadly that the dry forests need some fire for their health. Programs reintroducing fire to the dry forests have been underway for years.
Though west-side forests are shaped by fire historically, we cannot prescribe fire there and expect desirable results. The argument that suppressing fire now will lead to worse fires later has a sound basis in many dry lands, but less so near our coast. (The sound basis involves increases in tree density, but on the west-side the forests are dense anyway.) And they grade northward into forests that lack much fire but are fairly similar. Granted, without fire there are fewer Douglas-firs. But it takes many hundreds of years for Douglas-fir to die out via succession without fire. Given climate change on the one hand and the number of planted Douglas-firs on the other, I don’t see lack of fire as a threat to Douglas-fir numbers.
The high value of west-side forests as a carbon sink is another reason to prefer that they not burn. They mitigate climate change better with less fire. That said, fire may help maintain healthy heterogeneity, and help forests adapt to climate change by making way for species and genetic strains suited to a warmer climate.
In sum, fire science supports a view that west-side forests should be managed to leave unlogged old-growth completely alone, and on previously logged land to employ logging systems (“variable retention”) that mimic the patchiness of historic fires by leaving sizable clumps uncut, leaving snags and down trees in place, and encouraging mixed or patchy regrowth of both deciduous trees and conifers. Carefully planned patterns of different ages and tree types—including deciduous trees—could potentially interrupt the spread of fires, helping to limit the area burned and to perpetuate patchy diversity.
A warmer world will be effectively drier. There will be fire.
Climate change is affecting our forests in ways that will likely accelerate in our lifetimes.
Looking at climate effects very broadly, we can say that species will adapt by shifting northward and upslope. During the Ice Ages there were cycles of sudden warming that may have been at least as fast; Greenland is thought to have warmed 29°F in 50 years—more than once! No doubt it went a little slower down at latitudes that had trees. Species migrated northward then. It was a chaotic process, taking a thousand years or more to recombine species into long-lasting communities.
Scientists have published many climate envelope studies that look at the exact climate each tree is found in today and plot where that climate would exist at various future dates under various climate models and scenarios. I wouldn’t bet the farm on those predictions. There are too many variables—too many climate variables to make precise climate predictions, and then on top of that you must add uncountable interactions of different organisms responding to climate. How fast does this tree migrate relative to its competitors, including potential new invasive species? Relative to its symbiotic partners? Its herbivores and pests? For long-lived species, will individuals that already tower over the competition be able to live a normal lifespan after their climate envelope shifts away from them? The climate envelope tells you where the species currently competes successfully; but cultivated trees demonstrate good growth in diverse climates. A species’ chances will improve where its competitors fare poorly. In sum, future plant communities, like present ones, will be novel combinations that result from unpredictable coincidences in the trajectories of climate and of other species.
(Climate envelope studies do offer guidance on where to plant species northward. Redwood, say, or western larch, can be planted in all the areas predicted for them. Many plantings may fail; some may succeed, multiply, and replenish the earth.)
Aside from the trees invading subalpine meadows, the predicted range shifts within our range aren’t clearly happening yet. Elsewhere in the West, warming-related regional die-offs have hit two of our trees—aspen and Alaska cedar are declining dramatically due to warming.
There is a little more certainty regarding broader climate-related trends:
• faster growth with CO2 enrichment
• pests extending their ranges
• slower growth or higher mortality with longer dry seasons
• faster growth with longer snow-free seasons
• more fire
Since carbon dioxide (CO2) is the basic feedstock of photosynthesis, higher concentrations of it in the air can enable plants to photosynthesize more efficiently, using less water, and thereby to grow faster. This is the biggest known negative feedback from rising CO2 levels (negative means it’s a good thing: it keeps CO2 from increasing even faster). While many studies confirm gains in efficiency at the leaf level, results are mixed as to whether they produce a net gain in growth. Studies in our area are among the more positive. Apparently either drought or limited availability of nitrogen block the potential gains in a great many areas. Some soils may take care of the nitrogen limitation, up to a point, as plant roots and symbiotic partners in the soil respond to revved-up photosynthesis by revving up nitrogen cycling.
Insect pests have sweeping effects on tree populations. Some are likely to increase with climate change. For example, the worst pest of Douglas-fir and grand fir, the western spruce budworm, mounts outbreaks that tend to follow droughts. The overall worst recent insect epidemic—mountain pine beetles since 2000—swept into areas that had until now been too cold for this pest to mount epidemics, including higher elevations and much of British Columbia (p. 474).
There’s little doubt that tree mortality from diseases, pests, and fire is on the increase. But what about less visible background mortality? Even in a healthy forest, some trees die most years. Over a recent 30-year period, the percentage of trees dying per year on a set of 47 study plots in the Pacific Northwest shot up from around 0.4 to 1.3 percent. These were protected old-growth forests not hit by fires or pestilences. The authors of this bombshell study ruled out simple forest succession and all other possible causes but one: they speculated that drought stress in the warming climate must be to blame. Less water supports fewer trees. (I hesitate to present that study as established fact until corroborating studies appear; there have been some partially countervailing studies on smaller geographic or time scales.)
Drought stress increases when temperatures rise. As far as a plant is concerned, our region is getting drier even if annual precipitation is going up. And yes, the climate models generally lean toward increased total precipitation for us, at least in winter and spring. But with warmer temperatures, more of that precipitation will be rain, less will be mountain snow. Our “traditional” mountain snowpack doles out water and keeps the streams full well into July. When winter rains alternate with (and tend to melt) winter snow, the winter precipitation will run off much earlier in the year, and will be unavailable for a large part of the growing season. Hotter air also evaporates water faster from soil, creeks, and plant leaves—another reason warmer means dryer, to a plant.
Depending on where you are in our mountains, limits on the plant growing season may include freezing temperatures, burial in snow, or drought. Where it’s snow, most plants should be happy with warming, and trees should grow a little faster. Due to competition, this benign effect makes losers as well as winners. For example, Alaska cedar grows slowly and succeeds mainly on sites too snowy and wet for most trees; even if it grows a bit faster than before it will be outpaced by new competitors in a less snowy world.
On the other side of our range, the dry side, many plants tend to shut down in late summer when it gets really dry. With climate change, that will happen earlier, probably more than offsetting earlier growth in spring. The growing season will be shorter on these sites, tree growth will slow, and drought-stressed trees will be more vulnerable to pests and fire.
Pseudotsuga menziesii (soo-doe-tsoo-ga: false hemlock; men-zee-see-eye: for Archibald Menzies, p. 136). Needles ½–1½ in., varying from nearly flat-lying to almost uniformly radiating around the twig, generally with white stomatal stripes on the underside only, blunt-pointed (neither sharp to the touch nor notch-tipped nor broadly rounded); cones 2½–4 in. × 1½ in., with a paper-thin 3-pointed bract sticking out beneath each woody scale; soft young cones sometimes crimson or yellow briefly in spring; young bark gray, thin, smooth with resin blisters; mature bark dark brown, deeply grooved (up to 12 in. thick with grooves 8 in. deep), made up of alternating tan and reddish brown layers visible in cross-section slice; winter buds ¼ in. long, pointed, not sticky; trunk tapering little, commonly 6 ft. dbh × 250 ft.; biggest living tree, on VI, is 13 ft. 10 in. dbh; tallest today is 326 ft. Almost ubiquitous up to at least 4000 ft. Pinaceae.
Douglas-fir
This is far and away our most abundant and widespread tree, and one of our biggest. It’s the mainstay of the Northwest timber industry, leading in both volume and high value per board foot. It would be a good candidate for World’s strongest, straightest, fastest-growing tree.
I’ll go out on a limb and claim that it’s also the tallest. The tallest tree standing is a 379-foot coast redwood, but the redwood’s claim is an artifact of early logging, which wiped out the finest Douglas-fir stands. Two felled firs measured by professional foresters were 400 and 393 feet tall; another with fairly reliable stats was said to stand 415 feet. The 400-footer was 13 feet 8 inches thick, rivaling redwoods in bulk as well as height. Logging may have claimed taller redwoods, but no such measurement has come to light. A Doug-fir planted in New Zealand in 1859 is 229 feet tall, probably the world record for a cultivated conifer.
The tree is named for David Douglas, sometimes ridiculously called “the Discoverer of Douglas-fir.” There were many people around these firs for 10,000 years before him. Even to Western science, this species was described by another Scot, Archibald Menzies, botanist on Captain Vancouver’s ships in 1791. The tree didn’t escape Lewis and Clark’s notice either, in 1806. All that was left for Douglas to do in 1825 was to ship its seeds to England, where it was an immediate hit in gardens, and later in plantations. You can say he popularized it.
Douglas called it a pine; later taxonomists tried “yew-leafed-fir,” “spruce,” and finally “false-hemlock,” while sticking with fir for the common name. It is none of these. Like our hemlocks and cedars (two more botched European names), it is in a genus with species in Japan and China.
For a century, while timber extraction ruled Northwest economics, Doug-fir was the top timber species and Washington and Oregon were the top timber states. A century of overcutting finally caught up with us in the 1990s, and fewer board feet of Doug-fir are logged in the United States today than of pines from southeastern plantations. British Columbia is still a huge timber producer, but Douglas-fir’s share of British Columbia’s timber stock and production has generally been around 10 percent.
In earlier decades, clearcuts in Oregon and Washington were replanted in nothing but Doug-fir, seen as the fastest way to regrow lumber, but current advice steers planters away from Doug-fir in locales that have either of two fungal diseases. The first, Swiss needle cast, infests Oregon’s coastal slopes, stunting the growth of Doug-firs so much that hemlocks outpace them. The second, laminated root rot, spreads death slowly and inexorably in patches throughout our region. Both diseases are native; the Swiss described needle cast first, but it got there from here. Swiss needle cast is increasing, perhaps due to warmer winters and wetter springs. Or possibly it wasn’t severe in natural forests simply because Douglas-fir was mixed with greater numbers of spruce, hemlock, and cedar. It’s a threat in the coastal fog belt, the range of Sitka spruce, not apparently in the Cascades.
Even more than disease, climate change makes mixed planting smarter than monocultures. Some landowners already plant coast redwood in the Coast Range. Since we don’t know which species will do best fifty years from now, we should increase diversity, not only of species but of the geographic sources of each species, favoring diverse sources from farther south and from lower elevations.
Douglas-fir abounds over a wider elevational range than our other trees, and equally so on both sides of the Cascade Crest. On the east slope it is considered shade-tolerant because it is more so than pines and larches, which are most of the competition. East-side canopies are sparser and don’t produce deep shade. On the west, it is seral, meaning it may yield to more shade-tolerant trees in the course of forest succession. It’s seedlings can’t grow in the shade of a closed forest canopy. But canopies don’t stay closed long enough to sweep Doug-fir off the board in Oregon and Washington; there are too many fires and other gap-forming agents, and Doug-firs live too long. Researchers who watched the rate of species change in a 400-year-old west-side forest for 20 years calculated that Douglas-fir would take an additional 755 years to disappear.
Considering how much Douglas-fir there is, it’s remarkable that no insect has evolved to eat it in damaging quantities, let alone kill it in epidemics—at least on the west-side. East of the crest, epidemics of western spruce budworm (a moth larva) defoliate firs and their neighbor trees in great swathes. Trees usually survive a defoliation, but spruce budworm gets lethal when it defoliates a tree two or three years in a row, weakening it to where it dies of other causes. Let’s hope that a drying climate doesn’t bring budworm epidemics to the west-side.
Douglas-fir
Douglas-fir moved into the Northwest fast 14,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. We don’t know where it moved in from. Some areas near the Oregon-California line were probably warm enough for it, but its pollen does not predominate in any ice age pollen study. The warm era between 9000 and 5000 years ago established it in the west-side foothills and lower mountains. Frequent fires apparently kept those forests relatively open, preventing shade-tolerant hemlocks and true firs from becoming abundant. Mature Doug-fir bark, thick and corky, is as fireproof as any in our region.
The seedlings are a winter staple for deer and hares, and the seeds are eaten by small birds and rodents. Bears strip the bark to eat its succulent inner layer (photo on p. 380). This wounds the tree, sometimes fatally, by making an opening for insects or rot; but some trees survive for many decades.
Douglas-fir’s commercial reputation was built upon our legacy of old-growth fir trees. That kind of wood, sold today as CVG (clear vertical-grain) fir, is pricey, since most remaining old growth is now protected from logging. Fir from rapidly grown second-growth trees is softer, lighter, paler, knottier, and weaker—but still stronger than many competing softwoods. A hundred years ago, CVG was nothing special, and was used for beams in any and every building. Beams salvaged from old buildings are now the richest lode of CVG fir.
The most surprising commercial use of Douglas-fir is in fine alcoholic spirits—an eau de vie infused with young Douglas-fir branch tips. Distiller Steve McCarthy “struggled with getting the intense spring conifer aroma of the Douglas Fir, the citrus flavor, and the emerald green/chartreuse color of the buds to reveal themselves in the same batch.” After 15 years of trials, he got it. A hint of sweetness in it recalls the legendary “Douglas-fir sugar,” a treat exuded by Douglas-fir needles under rare weather conditions in northeastern Washington.
Other Indian uses of the tree were also minor: sap could be chewed, thick bark gathered for fuel, and the trident-bristling cones, either tossed into the fire or gently warmed next to it, fortified people’s hopes for a break in the weather. Douglas-fir wood was economically unimportant until white men came with steel tools; redcedar was much preferred, both for aesthetics and for ease of working. Only in Hawaii were the war canoes made from Doug-fir. That’s right: Doug-fir drift logs washed up on Hawaii shores.
In a Christmas tree lot, the fragrant trees are true firs, not Douglas-firs. But in the early summer midday sun on a Cascade slope, their foliage emits a heavenly balsam with a hint of strawberries.
Tsuga heterophylla (tsoo-ga: hemlock in Japanese; hetero-fill-a: varied leaves). Needles of mixed lengths, ¼–¾ in., round-tipped, flat, slightly grooved on top, with white stomatal stripes underneath only, spreading in flat sprays; most cones just ¾–1 in. long, thin-scaled, pendent from branch tips; mature bark up to 1 in. thick, platy, checked (almost as much horizontal as vertical texture); inner bark streaked dark red-purple; branch tips and treetop leader drooping; commonly 42 in. dbh × 200 ft.; champion tree is 9 ft. 1 in. dbh, in OlyM; tallest is 259 ft. in nw CA; greatest ring count was 1238, but such longevity is rare. Pinaceae.
Western hemlock
My image of western hemlock is of a sapling’s limbs, their lissome curves stippled a soft green made incandescent, in the understory dimness, by a stray swath of sunlight. Western hemlock is far and away our commonest understory sapling, owing to its efficiency at utilizing those scant filtered rays—its shade tolerance. Coastal British Columbia has more of it than any other tree species, and it is the state tree of Washington.
Western hemlock does not grow as large (nor live as long) as the largest Douglas-firs, Sitka spruces, or coast redwoods. Nevertheless, hemlocks tend to replace those behemoths in forest succession. Size and longevity may impress humans, but as competitive strategies they are useful mainly to trees that need a major disturbance in order to establish seedlings, and hence need old seed trees to hold out until the next such opportunity. Hemlock does not.
Notice the profusion of little hemlock cones on the forest floor, or on the tree, lending it a purplish cast. Cones are produced copiously every year—unlike most other conifers that drastically vary their seed production in order to limit the numbers of seed-eating creatures. Each year, a mature hemlock drops more than one viable seed per square inch under it. Precious few of them will grow into trees, especially if they land on the ground. More than any other species, western hemlock reproduction is confined to rotting logs, snags, and rootwads (p. 76).
On the Oregon coast, very young pure hemlock stands produce biomass at the fastest rate yet measured in the world. On into maturity, hemlock stands do well with density, and often hold a greater volume of wood than a like-aged stand of larger but necessarily sparser Douglas-firs. Hemlocks achieve their efficiency partly by sheer leafiness—a 6-inch trunk can support over 10,000 square feet of leaf surface area, almost twice as much as Douglas-firs. While the greater leaf area catches more light, it also loses more moisture; shade tolerance tends to be a tradeoff against drought tolerance.
A moth caterpillar called the hemlock looper is western hemlock’s only serious pest. Historically, outbreaks were infrequent but locally severe. They tend to correlate with consecutive warm summers that stretch out into dry Septembers, the season when the moth flies and lays eggs. These conditions are becoming more frequent.
With thin bark and shallow roots, hemlocks are vulnerable to fire, wind, and heart rot. A high proportion develop heart rot by age 200, and become hollow. A hollow tree eventually snaps and falls in a big piece, instantly creating a canopy gap that lets sun in, enabling understory plants to grow.
Competitive advantages surely must exist to make western hemlocks much more numerous than Pacific silver firs at lower elevations, and vice versa. However, each can thrive at the other’s elevation. Most of the biggest and oldest western hemlocks are up in the silver fir zone, apparently because cold inhibits the rot fungi, allowing the hemlocks to survive much longer.
Indian Paint fungus, Echinodontium tinctorium, is hemlock’s chief heart rot agent. It produces huge hard conks (shelf-like fruiting bodies) that were traded throughout the West as the first-choice pigment for red face paint. They were ground to powder and mixed with animal fat. Northwest tribes smeared hemlock pitch on their faces as a dark sticky base for face paint, or to prevent chapping. They used tannin-rich hemlock bark to tan skins; to dye and preserve wood (sometimes mashed with salmon eggs for a yellower dye); to shrink spruce-root baskets for watertightness; to make nets invisible to fish; and on their own skins to stop bleeding.
Under the bark lies a soft layer that some tribes ate to tide them over the lean times of late winter, after the dried salmon was all eaten or putrid. Countless hemlocks (and some Sitka spruces and other trees) died, their bark stripped to keep the Indians from starving. Though edible fresh, the “slimy cambium” was preferred steamed in pits over heated rocks laden with skunk-cabbage leaves, then pressed with berries and dried in cakes for later consumption with the universal condiment, eulachon oil.
The English word hemlock traces back to the year 700 as applied to deadly parsleys known for their role in Socrates’s execution. The English somehow saw parsley in the lacy foliage of a New England conifer, which they called hemlock spruce—later shortened to hemlock.
Tsuga mertensiana (mer-ten-see-ay-na: for Karl H. Mertens, p. 147). Also black hemlock. Needles ½–¾ in., bluish green with white stomatal stripes on both top and bottom, somewhat ridged and thus 3- or 4-sided, radiating from all sides of twig, or upward- and forward-crowding on exposed timberline sites; cones 1–2½ in., light (but coarser than spruce cones), often purplish, borne on upper branch tips; bark much furrowed and cracked; mature crown rather broad; also grows as prostrate shrub at highest elevs; commonly 36 ft. dbh × 110 ft. (average much smaller); biggest tree of our subspecies is 4 ft. 2 in. dbh × 194 ft.; the CA subspecies has stouter specimens, but not taller ones; oldest about 1400 years. Subalpine; abundant near and w of both crests. Pinaceae.
Mountain hemlock
The compact, gnarled shoulders of mountain hemlocks shrug off the heaviest snow loads in the world, from the Sierra Nevada to southeast Alaska’s coastal mountains. At every age, this species’ form is brutally determined by snow. The seedlings and saplings are gently buried by the fall snows, then flattened when the snowpack, accumulating weight, begins to creep downslope. When tramping across the subalpine snowpack on a hot June afternoon, you can almost hear the tension underfoot of all those young trees straining to free themselves and begin their brief growing season. The stress of your foot on the surface may trip some unseen equilibrium, snapping a hemlock top a few feet into the air. After the trees grow big enough to take a vertical stance year-round, they may keep a sharp bend at the base (“pistol-butt”) as a mark of their seasons of prostration. Even in maturity they may get tilted again, on sites so steep and unstable that even the soil creeps downslope. Their crowns grow ragged from limbs breaking.
Some limbs, after being encased in snow the better part of the year, spend the remainder matted with snow mold, a weird black fungus, Herpotrichia nigra (which translates to “creeping black hair,” but the really hairlike black stuff is horsehair lichen, p. 334). Fortunately, snow mold isn’t as deadly as it looks.
Mountain hemlock is the predominant timberline tree of the wetter half of our subalpine zone. Eastward, it mixes with increasing numbers of subalpine firs, which predominate still farther east and may mix with whitebark pines or alpine larches. A little lower are the closed subalpine forests where it shares dominance with Pacific silver fir except in areas hit by laminated root rot (p. 314), which is deadlier to hemlocks than to true firs. Mountain and western hemlocks seldom grow in the same place; where they do, they may hybridize.
Mountain hemlock
Abies lasiocarpa (ay-beez: Roman for fir; lazy-o-car-pa: shaggy fruit). Also A. bifolia. Needles ¾–1½ in., bluish green with one broad white stomatal stripe above and two fine stripes beneath, usually curving to densely crowd the upper side of the twig, tips variable; cones purplish gray to black, barrel- to cigar-shaped, 2½–4 in. × 1¼ in., borne erect on upper branches, dropping their seeds and scales singly while the core remains on the branch; bark thin, gray, smooth except in great age, without superficial resin blisters; upper branches short, horizontal, lower branches at ground level, long; commonly 2 ft. dbh × 100 ft., or shrubby, prostrate; biggest tree is 6 ft. 8 in.; tallest is 171 ft.—both in WA. Abundant at timberline, more so eastward; rarely down to low elevs. Pinaceae.
Subalpine fir
The peculiar narrow spires of subalpine firs, ubiquitous at timberline here and in the northern Rockies, stay in my mind’s eye as the archetype of a subalpine tree. The upper limbs are short and stubby because, being true fir limbs, they’re stiffly horizontal and brittle; if they were long, they wouldn’t hold up to the snow and wind in the subalpine zone. The long lower limbs escape those stresses by spending the winter buried in the snow; their way of hugging the ground puts them where they need to be for layering, or reproducing by sprouting new roots, and then stems, from branches in contact with soil.
At highest elevations—the scrub line—subalpine fir grows as a low, twisty shrub thicket called krummholz, and spreads almost exclusively by layering. Occasionally it becomes a tree-shrub chimera—a little tree with voluminous krummholz skirts. Krummholz is confined to the outline of the winter snowpack, because any foliage above the snowpack was killed by a combination of wind desiccation, frost rupturing, and abrasion by driven snow. This is the krummholz way of life. The tree with skirts may occur after a couple of winters with deeper snow, providing growing room for half a dozen little vertical shoots. The next time a normal-snowfall winter came, one of the shoots managed to survive with some needles on its downwind side—the side relatively protected from desiccation and abrasion. Years later, the little tree is likely flagged, its surviving limbs positioned downwind and above the snow abrasion zone (the first 8–12 inches above the snow or krummholz level).
Subalpine firs acquired a serious enemy here in 1957, when the balsam woolly adelgid reached our area. Mortality reaches 80 percent in a few mid-elevation stands, but it doesn’t seem to reach the species-threatening level seen in the Appalachians with the closely related hemlock woolly adelgid. It may get worse in the near future, as the aphid seems to prefer the warmer years here. You can recognize this European aphid’s victims (in any of our true fir species) by their extremely swollen branch tips. The weakened victims often fall prey to the western balsam bark beetle, a native insect that is more of a chronic low-level killer than its pine beetle cousins (p. 473).
In subalpine forests of northeast Washington and much of the Rockies, subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce are late-successional codominants. In our range, subalpine fir in forests can be replaced by the more shade-tolerant hemlocks, silver and grand firs. It reaches elevations as low as 3000 feet or even 2000 feet in cold air pockets and scant-soil sites like lava flows and talus.
Subalpine fir
Timberline is really an elevation belt encompassing three lines, each rather irregular:
Forest line is the upper boundary of continuous closed forest growth. Meadows enclosed by forest may also occur below forest line at any elevation, usually due to patch fires or to soil peculiarities. (Lower timberline is the similar boundary on the Cascades’ east slope below which forest gives way to steppe.)
Tree line is the upper boundary of erect tree growth.
Scrub line is the upper boundary of conifer species growing in the prostrate, shrubby form called krummholz (“crookedwood”).
Everything above tree line is alpine. Everything between forest line and tree line—a mosaic or parkland of meadows, heather, tree clumps, and sometimes rocks—is subalpine. It’s deceptively broad: we think we’re at tree line until we look a thousand feet up the slope and see trees in crevices on the crags. The term “subalpine forest” combines the parkland tree clumps with the highest elevational belt of closed forests, defined mainly by the dominance of subalpine trees species like mountain hemlock, subalpine fir, and Alaska yellow cedar.
Not cold itself, but length of the snow-free season determines our upper timberlines. Needles need enough time to grow and then harden to protect themselves against freezing. Once hardened, they can easily handle winter temperatures here. Ecologists distinguish our timberlines from the “cold timberlines” in many parts of the world. Thanks to the prodigious amounts of snow here, we get a lower tree line and thus a wider subalpine parkland belt.
Though a little bit of lasting snow may be a conifer’s friend up on windswept alpine ridges, deep long-lasting snow is the biggest hindrance to tree establishment in subalpine parkland. (Another is downslope snow creep, which scours seedlings away.)
Once seedlings are several feet tall they can start photosynthesizing long before the snow is gone, but making it past the seedling stage in the open requires a run of longer than average snow-free seasons. Such a run between 1920 and 1945 started a generation of trees scattered across subalpine meadows. Region-wide tree invasion of subalpine meadows has resumed in recent decades.
Such invasions contrast with the normal mode of slow tree-clump expansion. It’s easier for seedlings to get their start next to a tree, for two reasons. First, most subalpine trees are adept at layering, or growing a new stem where branches in contact with earth take root; the parent limb feeds the new shoot intravenously, a big advantage over growing from seed. Second, during spring thaw tree foliage, being dark, absorbs more of the sun’s heat than open snow does, and melts itself a little well in the last few feet of snow. The well is a microsite with a growing season several weeks longer than the surrounding meadow—just what seedlings need. Hence trees in subalpine parkland typically grow in tight, slowly expanding clumps, often elongated downslope into a teardrop shape. Look for a sort of successional sequence from the edge of a tree clump inward, such as red heather to black huckleberry to white rhododendron to subalpine fir to mountain hemlock to silver fir. Sometimes the pioneer trees in the center die and nothing but shrubs manages to grow there, leaving a hollow tree clump or timber atoll.
Timberline is a visible dynamic equilibrium. It responds to slight changes in climate—but so slowly that timberline soils and communities today are still recovering from the Ice Age.
Charcoal in meadow soil profiles reveals that most meadow areas below tree line have grown trees at least once since the Ice Age. With warming climate, trees will take over subalpine meadows, but this probably won’t happen soon everywhere. Subalpine fires are likely to increase, and high meadows can persevere for decades after each fire, as we see from the grass balds common on mountaintops of our lower ranges.
Subalpine meadow plants should be able to take over some present-day alpine tundra, but will be held back from doing so by a lack of developed soils. Even without the soil problem, we’d be looking at a shrinking land base for our subalpine zone, since it is already near our mountaintops. Subalpine meadows are likely to be among the biggest losers from climate change.
Subalpine fir krummholz that has erected a tree.
Abies amabilis (a-ma-bil-iss: lovely). Also lovely fir. Needles of two sizes: some ¾–1¼ in., flat-spreading, others ¼–¾ in., pointing forward and upward along the twig and hiding it; dark glossy green on top, with two white stripes beneath; notch-tipped except on cone-bearing branches; cones dense, heavy, barrel-shaped, 3–5 in. × 1½–2 in., green maturing to brown, borne erect on upper branches, dropping their seeds and scales singly while the cores remain on the branch a year or more; bark resin-blistered, gray or white-lichen-coated and smooth except in great age; commonly 40 in. dbh × 165 ft.; biggest tree was 7 ft. 9 in. dbh; tallest is 236 ft.; both on Olympic Peninsula; oldest is 725 years. Dense mature forests, mainly 3000–5000 ft. on w-side and near crests on e-side. Pinaceae.
Pacific silver fir
The handsome dark needles of silver fir lie mostly in a flat plane; an additional series of shorter ones presses forward in a herringbone-like pattern that neatly hides the twig from directly above. This unique arrangement is the first clue both to which species this is and to what it’s up to—shade tolerance. Hiding the twig from above means not letting any sunlight go to waste on a nonphotosynthesizing surface. The dark surface also maximizes light absorption.
The first appearance of these forest-green saplings can bolster your sense of progress during slow hours of switchbacking up from valley floor to high basins. Vistas unfold, even while you can’t see out of the forest. The shrub layer is thinning, showing off charming montane herbs like bunchberry, bead lily, false-Solomon’s-seal, coralroot and wintergreens. It can be incredibly quiet, with only faint fricative sounds sifting up from some torrent far below. A grouse flushing under your nose can set your heart pounding. Don’t be alarmed if an unseen assailant high in the trees bombards you in September; it’s only a Douglas squirrel harvesting big thudding silver fir cones for winter stores.
Young silver firs have resin blisters and silvery crust lichens.
Expect silver fir to be a late-successional dominant everywhere you see it’s saplings, since it’s our most shade-tolerant tree. Mainly that’s in a mid-elevation belt that gets lower northward, reaching sea level in southeast Alaska. Silver fir occurs sporadically in lowlands here, and actually grew a world’s-biggest specimen on low-elevation state forestry land near Forks, Washington (this tree was “saved” from the chainsaw when it was identified as a champion; after the logging operation took down all its neighbors, it inevitably blew down a few years later). Silver fir can reach tree line in the company of other trees, but does less well in the open, being prone to windthrow and excessive transpiration.
Along with deep shade, late-lying deep snow is a second challenge silver fir confronts. The dry season is often well under way before the snowpack melts from silver fir habitats; within a few weeks the meltwater is gone and the needle duff seedbed may be bone dry. Silver fir seeds germinate the moment they see the light of day after the winter chill—even though this means all too many of them germinate on snow and die. Luckier ones survive by putting more of their energy into growing down than up—raising their shoots an inch or so while their root descends a few feet to tap into summer-long moisture.
Amabilis is one of several names we have from the pen of David Douglas. Travelers of his day found that, of all boughs, silver fir made the loveliest bedding.
Pacific silver fir
Abies grandis (gran-dis: big). Needles ¾–2 in., quite broad and thin, spreading in a flat plane from the twig, notch-tipped to rounded, dark green above, two white stomatal stripes beneath (but needles of topmost branches often neither flat-spreading nor dark); cones dense, heavy, cylindrical, 2½–4 in. × 1½ in., greenish, borne erect on upper branches, dropping their seeds and scales singly while the core remains; bark gray to light brown, resin-blistered, becoming ridged and flaky with age; commonly 44 in. dbh × 200 ft.; largest is 7.3 ft. dbh; historical record heights near 300 ft.; relatively short-lived. Common e of CasCr, 3200–5000 ft.; scattered on w-side. Pinaceae.
Grand fir
The foliage on a grand fir sapling catches your eye, the tidy flat array of long, broad needles showing off the glossy green color. Flat leaf arrays imply shade tolerance. Grand firs are only slightly less tolerant than western hemlocks and silver firs, and prefer less rainfall—30–45 inches per year, especially where summer drought is ameliorated by streamside groundwater or by mountain coolness.
That “either/or” preference makes the species ecologically two-faced, with two ecotypes sometimes treated as varieties. “Typical” grand fir is most common below 1500 feet west of the Cascade Crest, mostly in mildly rain-shadowed areas like the northeast Olympics and the Willamette Valley. “Montane” grand fir grows at mid-elevations in the Cascades and eastward, typically mixed with Douglas-fir, locally with ponderosa pine and other trees. Given a natural regime of frequent low-intensity fires, the pines and Douglas-firs would predominate—the thin-barked, shade-tolerant grand fir has been the beneficiary of Smokey’s fire-fighting campaigns. This has turned it into an ecological bad boy: the notoriously “sick” and fire-prone stands of the Blue Mountains are typically overly dense grand fir stands that filled in where ponderosa pines were logged out.
Grand fir’s close relative white fir, Abies concolor, plays similar roles in California. In southern Oregon the two species intergrade, or hybridize in proportions that vary along a continuum. (Many authorities show white fir in parts of Oregon, but Flora of Oregon disagrees, treating those Oregon trees as white-grand hybrids.) The ways that montane grand fir differs from typical grand fir—longer needles, more stomata in the upper groove, more upward curve, less notch at the tip—suggest that it may be part of that hybrid spectrum. Variable needles and lots of intergrading make our true firs notoriously hard to tell apart.
Grand fir
Abies procera (pross-er-a: noble). Needles ¾–1¼ in., bluish silvery green, usually with a central groove on top and white stomata on both top and bottom, typically in 4 distinct stripes, not notch-tipped, thick, more or less 4-sided, crowding and curving upward from the twig, many with a sharp “hockey-stick” curve at the base; cones dense, heavy, nearly cylindrical, 4–7 in. × 1¼–2½ in., green maturing dark red-brown, scales almost entirely covered by papery green to straw-colored bracts with slender upcurved points; cones erect on upper branches, dropping their seeds and scales singly while the core remains; young bark gray, smooth, resin-blistered; mature bark red-brown, thin, flaking, cracked rectangularly; branches horizontal; commonly 50 in. dbh × 210 ft.; a champion 9 ft. 5 in. dbh, died in 2009; oldest is a mere 321 years. W-side OR and WA CasR, OR CoastR, mainly at 3000–5500 ft. Pinaceae.
Noble fir
David Douglas and friends gave the West’s true firs scientific names meaning grand, lovely, magnificent, and noble. His choice nobilis was replaced in 1940 by procera, meaning tall, which fits at least as well, for this is the tallest and biggest true fir. The tallest specimen on record was blasted by Mt. St. Helens in 1980. It stood 325 feet tall, which is outdone by only three species—Douglas-fir, redwood, and Australia’s Eucalyptus regnans.
The evenly spaced annual tiers of stiffly horizontal limbs can be seen even from a quarter-mile away as a fine horizontal lined texture. Clean geometric form and balsam fragrance make this the top Northwest species for Christmas trees and wreaths. They cost more than similar-sized Douglas-firs because noble firs don’t grow as fast in their youth. Growth rate picks up impressively after the second decade, ranking among the best. Hundred-year and older noble firs are typically larger than like-aged Douglas-firs they grow with, and one noble fir stand has the highest measured biomass per acre outside of California.
Noble firs pioneer after fire, often mixed with Douglas-firs. Lovely stands result, with massive straight trunks supporting a dense canopy way up somewhere above 100 feet. As much as three-quarters of the total height may be limb-free, since their shade-intolerant foliage doesn’t photosynthesize enough to earn its keep after losing its place in the sun.
Noble fir
The wood is stronger than other true firs, and for a time it was sold as “larch” to avoid tarring it with the same brush as the soft, lightweight true firs. That effort lapsed once the supply was too small to bother; today it’s mostly sold as “hem-fir” or “whitewood.” The trees are planted in many foreign lands, both for lumber and for Christmas. They are less plagued by pests and diseases than some Northwest trees, and should be planted more, especially northward, to increase diversity and resilience.
Noble firs’ northern limit is Stevens Pass, Washington, though when planted farther north they thrive. Fossil pollen shows that they once grew far to the north, but have yet to reclaim either Canada or the Olympics following the retreat of ice age glaciers. Blame their slow migration on heavy seeds (poor wind-carrying distance) and shade intolerance; each time the northernmost noble firs are replaced by climax silver firs, the migration is pushed back until fire clears a path again.
Toward their southern limit, starting near the Mackenzie River, Oregon, they hybridize and intergrade with Shasta red fir, Abies magnifica var. shastensis, whose needles are not grooved on top.
Noble fir
Picea sitchensis (pis-ia: Roman name, from “pitch,” for some conifer; sit-ken-sis: of Sitka, Alaska). Needles stiff and very sharp, 3-sided (flat on top), ½–1 in. long, equally on all sides of the twig, light green with 2 stomatal stripes on top only; young twigs smooth, old defoliated twigs rough and scratchy with the peg-like bases of the fallen needles; cones 2–3½ in., light, scales thin and finely, irregularly toothed; bark scaly, thin (less than ¾ in., even on huge trees); mature trunks very straight, round, and untapering, though often buttressed; commonly 7 ft. 6 in. dbh × 235 ft.; biggest tree (biggest of any species of spruce) on the Queets River, WA, is 15 ft. dbh; there are old photos of a 24-footer in Gods Valley, OR; tallest is 317 ft., in ne CA; not remarkably long-lived. W-side lowlands; abundant near Pacific, infrequent in WA CasR; not in OR CasR. Pinaceae.
A rainforest spruce towers over red alders.
Sitka spruce occupies a 2100-mile coastal strip bounded by the reach of ocean fog. While it thrives almost anywhere in the fog belt, it reaches its true glory on floodplains, especially on the western rivers of the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island.
These rivers are extravagantly dynamic, with peak flow in winter 100 times greater than their summer minimum flow. Meandering across their floodplains, they topple groves of forest and lay down bare cobble beds for new ones. Willows and alders pioneer on the new river bars; a few Sitka spruce seedlings may also grow on sites with silt and protection. Leaf litter from the alders rapidly produces fertile soil, and most spruces and cottonwoods get started a few decades later, as the alders start to die off. This pathway produces a rather open-crowned forest—and ideal conditions for Sitka spruces. They grow very fast, often reaching 8 feet in diameter within 225 years. Few of the enormous spruces of the Queets, Quinault, or Carmanah valleys are more than 300 years old. In the estimation of champion-tree archdruid Bob Van Pelt, the champion Queets Spruce is 400 years old, whereas the similar-sized champion Queets Douglas-fir is 1000.
At first, Sitka spruce is the only conifer growing on this former river bar—the only one that can tolerate the frequent winter floods. The bar gradually “rises” out of the flood zone as erosion lowers the riverbed; soils also get deeper, and in the second century western hemlocks and maples get going. Hemlocks tolerate shade better than spruces, and theoretically may take over eventually, but we don’t often see these spruce canopies closing up enough to completely shade out spruce seedlings. Elk may help: they congregate in Olympic valleys every winter, browsing some hemlock seedlings, avoiding prickly spruce, and especially browsing broadleaf shrubs, which helps to keep the forest open. Enormous and relatively short-lived, the spruces eventually begin to fall and create big canopy gaps and nurse logs for a next generation.
As you might expect with fast growth, the wood is lightweight, but it is strong—probably the strongest of all woods in proportion to weight, hence ideal for aircraft. It got pounced on to provide airplane frames for the Allies in World War I. Sitka spruce logging in the United States peaked then at more than twice the volume of any time since—except for World War II, when airplanes again used a lot of spruce.
Today the arts claim the highest-grade spruce. It has the best resonance for piano sounding-boards and guitar tops, especially the big clear, straight-grained sections from big old trees. Sitka spruce is easily the most-planted timber species in Europe. A naturally occurring hybrid with the more northerly white spruce, P. glauca, has potential for commercial planting on the Northwest Coast, as it seems to resist the white pine weevil, which can stunt and deform young Sitka spruces.
The long, tough, sinewy small roots of Sitka spruce were vital to Northwest Coast culture. They supplied most of the exquisite and highly functional basketry, and also twine and rope, including whaling lines. A spruce twig stuck in the hair was a charm for whaling, while the harpoon tips were protected, and the canoes caulked, with spruce pitch. The Makah and Quinault were fond of chewing spruce pitch; it’s fragrant and spicy-sweet, turning bitterish as you chew it. Try some.
Sitka spruce
Picea engelmannii (eng-gell-mah-nee-eye: for Georg Engelmann). Also P. glauca subsp. engelmannii. Needles ¾–1¼ in., sharp, 4-sided, bad-smelling when crushed, crowding upward and forward from the twig or evenly around it, deep blue-green with stomatal stripes on all sides; young twigs minutely fuzzy (through 10× lens); cones 1½–2½ in., light, much like mountain hemlock cones but scales are thinner, closer, with wavy-toothed edges; often with cone-like galls from branch tips; bark thin, scaly; crown dense, narrow, with pendent branchlets; commonly 40 in. dbh × 160 ft.; or prostrate, shrubby; biggest living tree is 223 ft. tall (n CasR); greatest dbh 7 ft. 3 in.; oldest is 911 years. 3000–8000 ft. e of CasCr, often in n- to e-draining ravines; rare in ne OlyM. Pinaceae.
Engelmann spruce
Spruce foliage looks denser, drapier, darker, and slightly bluer than our other conifers. Spruces are the second most northerly conifer genus, after larches. In the Rockies, Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir dominate the higher forests. Here, this spruce specializes in cold, wet east-side sites, ranking about average in shade tolerance. Though it is large and distinctive among subalpine trees, its three stands in the Olympics, including two champion-sized Engelmann spruces, went undiscovered until 1968. Take that as a challenge to your tree-spotting skills.
Grouse like dense spruce crowns for relatively warm, dry roosts. These crowns often reach to the ground, and catch fire easily. Engelmann spruces can grow slowly but steadily for several centuries, but rarely achieve that potential because they are so susceptible to fire. Wet locations may protect some of them. They like aerated moisture—streamsides, not marshes.
In addition to their cones, many spruces bear curious cone-like appendages—galls, or “houses” for aphid larvae (p. 471). Gall tissue is secreted by a plant in response apparently to chemical stimulation, usually by a female insect laying eggs. A spruce gall terminates and envelopes new growth at a branch tip, but rarely harms the tree. The dead needles turn a tan color along with the gall; together they look much like a 1- to 2-inch cone with needle-tipped, melted-together “scales” hooding openings into a larval chamber. The gall may hang from the branch long after the larvae mature and move on. Other insects may move in.
After decades at the low end of the value scale, Engelmann spruce lumber at last found a market that appreciates it in Japan. Very white, it reminds of certain Japanese woods that are scarce now. It’s logged mainly east of our range, being rather scarce and inaccessible here.
Spruce pitch is chewable, fragrant, and sweetish, but sure sticks to your teeth. In the British Columbia Interior it was once a valued trade commodity.
Engelmann spruce
Nurse Logs
The best seedbed for a Northwest hemlock or spruce is the rotting trunk, stump, or upended rootwad of a fallen tree. In some stands these nurse logs support hundreds of seedlings and saplings while the ground in between has none. Redcedars and some other plants may grow on nurse logs, but are less dependent on them than hemlock and spruce. Evidence of past nurse logs, in the form of buttresses, prop roots, and colonnades, remains long after the nursing wood itself is gone.
By age 10 or sooner, a seedling extends fine rootlets down a nurse log’s sides to mineral soil, even from perches 20 feet up on snag tops. Over the decades, the rootlets grow into sturdy root “stilts” while the nurse log slowly rots out from underneath. At some point the support relationship may reverse, a few chunks of rotting nurse now dangling from tree stilts. Over two to six centuries, the nurse log disappears and the stilt roots fill in, remaining as buttresses on the lower trunk of a huge spruce, hemlock, or Douglas-fir (redcedars develop flaring buttresses without stilt root origins). Where adjacent trees’ buttresses head straight toward each other, more or less meshing, they were once stilt roots on the same nurse log. Under a row or colonnade of trees with aligned buttress roots, you may infer a bygone nurse log.
A nurse log plainly offers advantages to a seedling. Several hypotheses may explain why:
Competition for light Mark Harmon, who has studied our nurse logs more than anyone, prefers this explanation. In one study area, soil was cloaked in mats of moss too thick for seedlings to grow through to reach light in their first year. Nearby nurse logs had different moss species only an inch deep, and first-year shoots could get through that.
Surface soil drought Mountain and river-terrace soils are often stony and raw, holding water poorly. In some forests, canopy trees suck up most water near the surface, while dim light slows growth of a seedling’s root as it races to catch up with receding soil moisture in late summer. Even in the Olympic rainforest valleys, growth of a Sitka spruce is limited by its soil’s water-holding capacity. Soggy rotten logs offer moisture all summer long.
Fungal associates Several possible angles here: Decay fungi and bacteria convert nitrogen in the log into forms available to plants. Mycorrhizal fungi, which seedlings need to meet up and link with, are available in soil, but plausibly the kinds found in nurse logs may make better partners for hemlock and spruce seedlings. And in one study back east, hemlock seedlings in soil were killed by pathogenic fungi that were kept out of nearby nurse logs by thriving populations of decay fungi. Termites also help make the nurse log an easy substrate to root in.
Saturated soil Nurse logs are the rule in cedar swamps, where seedlings would drown during winter without a log to perch on.
Litter In high-elevation forests, hemlock seedlings in one study were flattened by mats of tree litter that coalesced within the snowpack as it melted. Litter sloughed harmlessly off of the nurse logs.
When you’re in shady forests, pay attention to the conifer seedlings, saplings, and young trees. Are the seedlings almost all on rotting wood? Do the older conifers show the stilts, buttresses, and alignments that indicate they were once nursed by logs? Then look at the ground. Is there a thick moss mat, or a crowd of small flowering plants—enough to shade out a conifer seedling?
Competition with small plants may be the main factor in some forests, but I’ve often seen nurse log forests where the first six inches above the ground don’t sport enough verdure to smother anything. The competition often looks fiercer up on the nurse logs.
A spruce propped over the space where its nurse log was.
Taxus brevifolia (tax-us: Greek name; brev-if-oh-lia: short leaf). Also Pacific yew. Needles ½–¾ in., grass-green on top, paler and concave beneath, spreading flat from the twig, broad and thin, drawing abruptly to a fine point but too soft to feel prickly; new twigs green; ♂, and ♀ “cones” on separate plants; seeds single within juicy red ¼-in. cup-shaped fruits; bark thin, peeling in large purple-brown scales to reveal red to purple new bark; upper branches angled up, often much longer than the leader; commonly 16 in. dbh × 35 ft.; or sometimes a sprawling shrub; champion is 4 ft. 9 in. dbh; trees 80 ft. tall have been reported. Scattered below 4500 ft. Taxaceae.
Western yew
Our yew is a conifer, with evergreen needles—but without cones. Instead it bears its seeds singly (on female trees) cupped within succulent red seed coats loosely termed “berries,” but technically arils. These are treacherously pleasant-tasting; the seeds of many yew species contain alkaloids capable of inducing cardiac arrest. Attractive but poisonous fruits are few in our area; smooth bright red berries are the ones to keep your kids away from (see baneberry, p. 270). Birds love yew berries, passing the toxic seeds undigested.
Woodworkers class all conifers as softwoods, but yew is among the hardest of woods. It can be worked with power tools, or even carved to make extraordinarily durable and beautiful utensils, with cream-colored sapwood and orange to rose heartwood. Yet few have worked it.
The Indians knew better. They made it into spoons, bowls, hair combs, drum frames, fishnet frames, canoe paddles, clam shovels, digging sticks, splitting wedges, war clubs, sea lion clubs, deer trap springs, arrows, and bows. (Yew species were the wood of choice for bows worldwide. The Greek name for yew, taxos, spawned both “toxin” and toxon, meaning “bow.”) Young Swinomish men rubbed yew limbs on their own in the belief that the yew’s strength, elasticity, and hardness would rub off on them. They also sometimes added yew needles to their smoking mixtures, perhaps more for “toxins” than flavor.
The beautiful, smooth underbark can be almost cherry red.
In 1987, Western science suddenly wanted yew bark. An order was filled for 60,000 pounds of bark from which to extract a tiny amount of taxol (paclitaxel), the cancer chemotherapy drug sensation of the 1990s. For a few years we feared that bark stripping might wipe the species out in its native habitat. (Those years and the matsutake bubble were the most lucrative recent years for Northwest brushpickers.) Fortunately for yew, the industry stopped buying bark after finding they could more economically synthesize the drug from cultivated European yew needles. Taxol also shows promise for reducing spinal cord injury, and stands as a sterling example of lifesaving drugs discovered growing under our noses.
Taxol in nature appears to be a coproduction of yews themselves and fungal endophytes living symbiotically in their needles. It may have evolved as a defense against pathogenic fungi and Phytophthora, a mysterious genus that includes the notorious killers sudden oak death and Port Orford cedar root rot. Western yew is the only species known to carry both of those pathogens, yet it has not been decimated by them anywhere—perhaps thanks to taxol.
Paradoxes about western yew go on and on. The largest of all yews, the smallest of our forest conifers. More tree than shrub in form, but its stature places it in the tall shrub layer. Like vine maple, it will root and start a new tree where its long limbs get pinned to the ground by branches fallen from above. Described anecdotally as a moist-site tree, in research plots it proved indifferent to climatic variation within west-side forests. Often called “scarce” or “little known,” it ranked 13th among all plant species in total cover in a big survey of west-side old growth. It is also common along east-side streams below 4000 feet. It is never a canopy tree here, but seems able to take over from taller trees in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains—thanks to fire suppression, since even low fires kill it. A shade plant, it turns orange all over when shade is removed, but it can survive. I’ve seen orange yew shrubs on steep, burningly exposed southwest slopes where it appeared they had never enjoyed any shade at all.
Western yew
The needles are bunched differently in these two genera: Pines of every species bear long evergreen needles in fascicles (bundles) bound together at the base by tiny membranous bracts. The number of needles per bundle (5, 3, 2, or 1) is the easiest way to identify pines; check a few bundles, since individual trees may be inconsistent. Five-needle pines (p. 84) are a subgenus loosely termed “white pines”; three-needle pines (p. 80) are sometimes called “yellow” or “red” pines. The Southwest has pinyon pines with bracted fascicles of just one needle.
Larches (p. 88–89) bear soft deciduous needles, mostly in fat false whorls of 15 to 40 needles at the tips of peg-like spur twigs about ¼ inch long and wide. However, on this year’s twigs the needles are single, and spirally arranged. Technically, the pegs and their whorls are also twigs—very short ones, with compressed spirals of single needles—hence “false whorls.” To the naked eye they are bunches.
Pinus ponderosa (pie-nus: the Roman name; ponder-oh-sa: massive). Also western yellow pine. Needles in bundles of 3, 4–10 in., yellowish green, clustered near branch tips; cones 3–6 in. × 2–3 in., closed and reddish until late in their second year, scales tipped with stout recurved barbs; young bark very dark brown, soon furrowing, maturing yellowish to light reddish brown and very thick, breaking up into plates and scales shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and fragrant when warm; commonly 44 in. dbh × 175 ft.; two tallest trees are 268 ft. (sw OR); oldest is 929 years. Dry low elevs e-side and in c OR w CasR; a few in e OlyM. Pinaceae.
Our drive of the forenoon of [September 8th, 1853] was still among the pine openings. The atmosphere was loaded with balm.
—Harvey Kimball Hines
I can almost say I never saw anything more beautiful . . . the forests so different from anything I have seen before. The country all through is burnt over, so often there is not the least underbrush, but the grass grows thick and beautiful. It is now ripe and yellow and in the spaces betweeen the groves (which are large and many) looks like fields of grain ripened, ready for the harvest.
—Rebecca Ketcham
Ponderosa pine
Oregon Trail emigrants like Harvey Kimball Hines and Rebecca Ketcham loved the ponderosa pine forests of eastern Oregon, and not just because they were easy to haul a covered wagon through. They’re gorgeous, and ineffably aromatic in the summer sun—like warm butterscotch, vanilla, or caramel, but with an edge. A little less saccharine, a little more toast. (The Jepson Manual, however, uses lack of a vanilla fragrance in bark crevices as an ID character for ponderosa. I guess people vary in their sense of smell, or in their vocabularies for smells.)
That classic parklike ponderosa stand is a product of frequent ground fires. Old ponderosas typically have fire scars showing that fires came through at 3- to 20-year intervals. Picture these as grass and brush fires, neither tall nor particularly hot. They weeded out most conifer saplings and some of the bigger trees, especially those with thinner bark. Here and there the flames leapt up and torched an old pine, too, but enough survived to provide all the “yellowbellies” the pioneers saw. Mature ponderosas are the most fire-resistant trees in their range, thanks to thick bark and high crowns, but young ones are vulnerable. The sapling that stands the best chance of surviving fires to reach full size is the one growing away from others, because the two fuels that would bring ground fire to it are other saplings and the needle litter under big trees.
Ponderosa pines don’t just tolerate low-severity fires; they foment them. In contrast to puny needles that quickly decompose as duff, long pine needles dry out and persist as quick-flaring fine fuel, either on the ground or as “needledrape” on shrub twigs. Falling needles drape because they fall as three needles bundled together at the base.
Those classic open stands are uncommon today, because that fire regime ended with white settlement. First came sheep that overgrazed, eliminating grass fires. Later came “high-grading”—logging that picked the valuable biggest and most fire-resistant pines first. Then intentional fire suppression. The stands filled in with grand firs and Douglas-firs. Crowded trees are more vulnerable to several kinds of lethal pests, and they also carry flame to the ponderosa pine crowns. Today, forest fires in the range of ponderosa tend to be high-severity, stand-replacing fires. Foresters have figured all this out and begun programs to restore ponderosa pine forests, using thinning followed by prescribed fire. This shows much promise, though there are kinks to work out and budgets are grossly inadequate to treat all the federal lands that need it.
All too often, logging companies have taken advantage of restoration thinning projects to log more big trees than restoration calls for. A vocal minority of ecologists think that restoration is often just an excuse to log, and is overall a cure that’s worse than the disease. To back that up, they pose an alternative view of ponderosa pine ecology in which crowded, mixed stands like today’s were the presettlement norm, and ponderosa parks and low-severity fires were not the norm. This scenario has a hard time accounting for the verifiable numbers of big, old ponderosa pines. I can only conclude that it is politically inspired. (I’m happy, though, to hear them debunk the media nonsense of calling every severe fire “catastrophic,” or saying that a fire “destroyed” X number of acres of forest.)
Ponderosa pine
Ponderosa pine has lower rainfall requirements than any other big tree in our range. As a result, lower timberlines on the east slope are ponderosa groves (joined locally by scrubbier junipers or white oaks). Soil texture becomes a factor. Central Oregon’s Lost Forest is an isolated stand of ponderosas and junipers neatly filling a patch of sandy soil, surrounded by 40 miles of sagebrush steppe on clayey soil. It lives on 8.7 inches of precipitation a year, the least rainfall supporting a forest anywhere in the American West. Kansas and Nebraska have more—so who knows why the ponderosas in the Black Hills haven’t spread across the Great Plains?
Ponderosas less than a century old are called “black pine,” because they have dark gray bark, not warm-colored puzzle pieces. They don’t compare with mature ponderosas in fire resistance or in timber value. Old ponderosas fetched top dollar, but the relatively small number left today are an irreplaceable natural resource, and should be left alone.
Soft new inner bark, or cambium, of ponderosa was an important spring food resource for interior tribes. While most “pine nuts” in commerce come from pinyon and European stone pines, the seeds of all pines are delicious, fatty, and prized by birds and rodents, who bury countless seeds in small caches. They intend to come back for them some day but inevitably overlook some caches, a few of which germinate. Ponderosas evolved spines on their cones to discourage seed eating, but pines also benefit from it: critters plant seeds where wind might never carry them, and plant them deeper, in mineral soil often in litter-free spots, sparing the seedlings from drought and the eventual saplings from ground fire. When you see a clump of several pine seedlings within a square inch, it’s a forgotten cache.
Ponderosa pine: New needles emerging surrounded by pollen cones.
Pinus contorta Needles in twos, semi-circular in cross-section, 1½–2½ in. long, yellow-green; cones 1½–2 in. long, egg-shaped, point of attachment usually quite off-center, scales sharp-tipped; cones abundant, borne even on very young trees (5–20 years), often persistent on the branch for many years either closed or open; bark thin (less than 1 in.), reddish brown to gray, scaly; commonly 20 in. dbh × 100 ft. tall; biggest is 43 in. × 135 ft. Common above 3500 ft. in e OlyM and CasR volcanic soils; scattered elsewhere. Pinaceae.
Lodgepole pine
Lodgepole pines are tricksters on the ecological playing field. They don’t bother to compete with our other conifers in size, longevity, shade tolerance, or fire resistance. They excel instead at rapid growth early in life, copiously produced and cleverly designed cones, and tolerance of any kind of soil. Prolific to a fault, they produce both pollen and seeds prodigiously year after year (a rarity among conifers). Their pollen drifts like an amber fog over midsummer’s meadows.
(Their signature punch, related to fire, is a trait prevalent in Rocky Mountain lodgepoles but rather uncommon here: cones sealed shut by a resin with a melting point of 113°F. The seeds inside, viable for decades, are protected through the fire by the closed cone. The fire kills the pines but melts their cone-sealing resin; the cone scales slowly open, shedding seeds upon a wide-open field. Seeds in these serotinous cones are a steady year-round food for the few animals, such as crossbills, capable of opening them. They do get a little easier to open as they weather, and have been seen opening prematurely during summer heat waves.)
As in rabbits, prolificacy leads to overpopulation—a dog-hair stand stunted by intraspecies competition. In this all-too-common circumstance, the speed demon slows to a near halt, like the rabbit that lost the race with the tortoise. It looks dismal to both foresters and hikers, but isn’t so bad in terms of species survival. In nature, the stagnant stand might well persist until fire comes and resets the stage, favoring lodgepole all over again.
Lodgepole pines abound in the Rockies from Colorado north; in our region they are widespread but somewhat fewer, and they usually bear cones that open without waiting for a fire. Instead they dominate their sites by tolerating difficult microclimates and substrates, like lava flows, mudflows, and pumice deposits from Cascade volcanoes—especially the 100-mile stretch of Oregon’s Cascade Crest and east-side mantled with pumice from the great Mt. Mazama eruption 7700 years ago. Frost pockets with extreme temperature fluctuations are another specialty. A third is soils derived from serpentine rock, whose chemistry many plants can’t handle (p. 532). Whatcom County’s Twin Sisters, a rare large block of the serpentine rock dunite, support lodgepole pine in krummholz form at timberline. This is our only tree species that grows both at timberline and sea level. Yes, “shore pines” in the salt spray zone at the coast are a form of lodgepole. The species name contorta describes that twisty, small type, whereas “lodgepole” describes the straight skinny interior type that Plains tribes used in teepees. (Taxonomically, some authorities don’t think the two forms warrant recognition, some treat them as two varieties, and some authorities recognize three of four varieties or subspecies.)
Where the Puget Ice Lobe melted away 14,000 years ago, lodgepole pines colonized and dominated the deglaciated land (with its raw soils) for several thousand years.
The epidemic of mountain pine beetles (p. 473) between 2000 and 2013 may have killed half of the full-grown lodgepole pines over much of the species’ range. Central Oregon had a severe beetle epidemic in the 1980s, and somewhat lower mortality this time around. Lodgepole pines dominated much of central British Columbia, where winters had formerly been too cold for bark beetles. By 2009 it was an area of dead trees the size of Wisconsin. Lodgepole pines had been the preferred trees for industrial lands there, but the textbooks are being rewritten now.
Lodgepole pine
After old dead trees lose their bark, you may notice many of them display sharply spiraled wood grain. In any one species, most individuals lack this spiral, but the twisted ones all twist in the same direction—to the right. Spiral grain happens mainly in harsh mountain environments, and it happens only as trees get old: trees have it only in the outer portion of their wood, which grew in advanced age.
The one scientific paper devoted to explaining corkscrew trees concludes that asymmetrical tree crowns twist in the direction the prevailing wind pushes them in. Our broad prevailing wind direction is WSW, and our trees tend to grow a little more foliage on their south sides, where the sun hits them. The opposite would apply in the Southern Hemisphere’s temperate zone, and sure enough, most conifers there twist to the left. However, so does one Rocky Mountain pine species. Perhaps the key is simply the broader point that spiraling makes the trunk stronger, an advantage in windy places.
Another hypothesis holds that spiral grain distributes sap (water and nutrients) from each root to all the branches, rather than only to the branches directly above that root. This would become more of an advantage after age and environmental hard knocks have damaged the vessels on one or more sides of the tree trunk.
Pinus albicaulis (al-bic-aw-lis: white bark). Needles in bundles of 5, 1½–3 in. long, yellow-green, in tufts at branch tips; cones 1½–3 in. long, egg-shaped, purplish, dense, long persistent on the tree while remaining closed; bark thin, scaly, superficially whitish or grayish; pollen cones carmine red; mature trees have several massive limbs, not just one straight trunk; commonly 20 in. dbh × 65 ft. tall; tallest is 90 ft. (ne OR); greatest dbh is 9 ft. 2 in. Alp/subalpine near and e of the crests; not on VI, infrequent in OlyM.
Whitebark pine
With their broad crowns and tufted, paler foliage, whitebark pines are easy to pick out from the other high-country conifers. They’re especially easy to identify when dead. If you see a subalpine ghost forest with whitened, forked, and crooked dead tree trunks towering over young spruces and firs, that was once a fine whitebark pine grove. The ghost trees may stand for many decades, giving an exaggerated sense of recent death, yet it’s true that we’re in the midst of a catastrophic decline of whitebark pines. The culprits are pine beetles (p. 473) and the introduced white pine blister rust disease (p. 87), abetted by fire suppression and climate change.
The pines are pioneers that establish after fire and then (without subsequent fires) gradually yield to faster-growing, more shade-tolerant fir and spruce. Cold limits both pine beetles and blister rust, so warming expands their range. Beetles ravaged whitebark pines in a warm phase around 1930, then were killed off in whitebark habitat by the cold winter of 1933. The recent warm phase, in contrast, shows no sign of letting up.
While studying whitebark mortality in Idaho, ecologist Dana Perkins found some magnificent survivors. One is 1267 years old—placing whitebark pine eleventh on the longest-lived tree species list.
Growth form varies with elevation. As krummholz (dense prostrate shrubs) whitebark pines reach the highest elevations of all our conifers—8200 feet in Washington’s Stuart Range. At their lowest (5000 feet) they grow straight, resembling lodgepole pines. Their main range is subalpine parkland, where they are usually contorted and multistemmed, but nevertheless erect up to 7000 feet. Blue grouse find their dense crowns cozy in winter.
Whitebark pine nuts travel on adopted wings. Their own undersized wings remain stuck to the cone scales while the cones remain stuck to the branch. Fat, heavy, and wingless, the seeds wouldn’t go far in the wind even if the cone did open, but they fly as far as 20 miles in the beaks of Clark’s nutcrackers, who then cache them to retrieve later. Nearly all whitebark seedlings originate from the tiny fraction that are cached in suitable soil, and then forgotten. This enables whitebarks to rapidly recolonize large burns where wind-disseminated trees can only crawl back, generation by generation, from the green periphery.
Nutcrackers cache as many as 15 pine nuts together. Several may germinate and grow as a clump. Ecologist Diana Tomback investigated whether the multistemmed form typical of whitebarks is genetic or a result of clumped seedlings fusing as they grow up. The answer: both, with fusers in the majority. You can’t tell fusers from clones visually.
Nutcrackers came to North America from Asia only two million years ago, likely bringing whitebark pine’s ancestors with them. While whitebarks were coevolving with nutcrackers, their closest European relatives coevolved as Swiss stone pines and spotted nutcrackers. Key elements to both mutualisms are big, oily seeds, cones that don’t open until forced, beaks and muscles to force them open, and food-caching behavior. Whitebarks and stone pines have traits with no clear adaptive value other than to accommodate birds. Cones grow on vertical branches near the top of the tree, making them easy for birds to see and work on.
The birds may possibly help save the pines from blister rust (p. 87). This deadly fungus kills trees from the top down, eliminating cone and seed production early. In infected stands, nutcrackers are thus forced to find the whitebarks with rust-resistant genes. Our region very likely suffered over 50 percent whitebark mortality by 1950, but there seems to be resistance in many populations today, both in the old survivors and the younger generation. A strong new cohort of whitebark seedlings established in 2007 thanks to heavy cone crops, and many of those seedlings that survive 20 years from now will presumably be rust-resistant.
But we can’t count on the birds, which are not as dependent on whitebarks as vice versa. When whitebark nuts are too scarce, nutcrackers migrate elsewhere; they like ponderosa pine nuts, too. Humans need to lend a hand in the replanting effort.
The mountain pine beetle, which has been killing whitebark pines in catastrophic numbers in the Rockies, has not yet reached some westernmost fringes of whitebark’s range. Still, the pines’ future looks bleak based on mapping the climate where they live now and where that climate will exist in 2080. They would need assistance to move fast enough to the new area such maps show for them, in northern British Columbia. Reality may not be that simple, though; they could benefit in their current range if increased fire and drought hold their competitors in check.
Whitebark pine
Pinus lambertiana (lam-ber-tee-ay-na: for Aylmer Lambert). Needles in bundles of 5, 2–4 in. long, blue-green with white bloom on all surfaces, sharp; cones 10–18 in. × 3–6 in. (the largest of all conifer cones) hanging from upper branch tips by stout 1½- to 3-in. stalks; seeds with wings 1–1½ in.; dark gray bark maturing reddish brown, deep-furrowed and scaly; commonly 4 ft. dbh × 180 ft.; the first sugar pine ever measured (by David Douglas in 1826, a fallen tree) remains the largest recorded diameter, 18 ft. 4 in.; a 274 ft. tallest grows in Yosemite NP. Low to mid elevs in c OR. Pinaceae.
Sugar pine
The biggest pine of all is this California tree, fairly common also in southern Oregon and petering out midstate, with a northernmost occurrence on the upper Clackamas River. Western white pine, our common five-needled, big-coned pine, overlaps sugar pine’s range, so don’t think you’re looking at a really big cone unless it’s a foot long. If it’s only 8–10 inches, it’s probably western white. Sugar pine is limited to hot dry sites on the west-side, mostly below 3000 feet, and (less commonly) well-watered sites on the east-side. Like other five-needle or “white” pines, it is vulnerable to white pine blister rust. (p. 87). The tasty, nutritious seeds from these giant cones are good-sized, but no larger than commercial pine nuts from small pines.
David Douglas counted the sugar pine as his greatest Northwest discovery. He trekked south from Fort Vancouver specifically to find it after being shown some seeds and told of the cones by Indians. When he found it he was alone in country almost totally unexplored by whites, somewhere near the Umpqua Divide. He retrieved cones by shooting them down with his rifle, leading forthwith to what he felt was his closest brush with death at the hands of Indians. He managed to divert them and run off with his precious specimens. The fallen sugar pine he measured that day remains the largest pine ever measured. The biggest sugar pines were all logged, with the sorry result that the largest pines living today are ponderosa pines. Sugar pine lumber fetches the best prices of any western pine.
Explaining the tree’s name, John Muir wrote that its sugar “is to my taste the best of sweets—better than maple sugar. It exudes from the heartwood, where wounds have been made, either by forest fires, or the ax, in the shape of irregular, crisp, candy-like kernels.”
Sugar pine
Pinus monticola (mon-tic-a-la: mtn dweller). Needles in bundles of 5, 2–4 in. long, blue-green with white bloom on inner surfaces only, blunt-tipped; cones 6–10 in. × 2–4 in., thin-scaled and flimsy for their size, often curved, borne by a short stalk from upper branch tips; young bark greenish gray, maturing to gray with a cinnamon interior, cracking in squares; commonly 3 ft. dbh × 120 ft.; biggest living tree is 6 ft. 9 in. dbh; tallest is 232 ft. Widely scattered at mid-elevs. Pinaceae.
Western white pine
Its Latin name notwithstanding, western white pine grows in coastal bogs as well as low-subalpine forests. The Idaho state tree, it once dominated vast forests (and the lumber trade) in northern Idaho, where diameters up to 8 feet 5 inches were recorded. Ironically, the hottest demand in the decades of peak western white pine production was for matchsticks.
In our mountains, white pines were a small minority a hundred years ago, and they’re even fewer today. You might walk by without noticing them, if it weren’t for their outsized cones on the ground among smaller cones from larger trees. Most you see today are young. The big, old ones were nearly all killed by an introduced fungus, white pine blister rust, Cronartium ribicola. This fungus may originally have been Asian, as it first gained notoriety as an invasive scourge of white pines (the eastern North American species) planted in Europe. Foresters were all watching in alarm, but couldn’t do much to stop it, as it spread first to eastern North America and then by 1923 to British Columbia, from where it spread throughout the West, attacking all of the five-needle or “white” species of pine.
Since the rust fungus requires an alternate host and the known hosts at the time were currants, programs to exterminate currants went on for decades. They proved futile. The disease killed off western white pines almost as inexorably as European chestnut blight killed American chestnuts.
A portion of white pines today grow big enough to produce seeds, sustaining a small, scattered population. Natural selection should increase the number of rust-resistant trees, and foresters assist that process through breeding. But blister rust can develop its own counter-resistance, and natural selection may spread that, too. In nature, species and their enemies coevolve over long periods, with selection ultimately eliminating genetic strains that fail to develop mutual survivability. The main reason we have so many catastrophic pests (and weeds) in modern times is that all our trade and travel continually make new bad matches between pests and hosts. When it comes to living organisms, free trade is a terrible thing.
Western white pine
Larix occidentalis (lair-ix: the Roman name; ox-i-den-tay-lis: western). Also tamarack. Needles deciduous, soft, pale green, 1–1¾ in., 15–30 in apparent whorls on short peg-like spurs (but on this year’s twigs, needles are single and spirally arranged); cones 1–1½ in., often persistent, reddish until dry, bristling with pointy bracts longer than the scales; young bark thin and gray, maturing 3–10 in. thick, often resembling either mature Douglas-fir (furrowed, brown) or ponderosa pine (colorful jigsaw flakes); commonly 52 in. dbh × 170 ft.; biggest living tree is 7 ft. 3 in., in Montana; tallest is 192 ft., in OR. 2500–5000 ft. e or very slightly w of the CasCr; barely in n CasR and not in CoastM, though abundant in ne WA and se BC. Pinaceae.
Western larch
A larch is something many people mistakenly think of as a contradiction—a deciduous conifer. The deciduous needles always set it off visually, even from a distance: intensely chartreuse in spring, then a subtler but still distinctive grass-green through summer, smashingly yellow for a few weeks in October, and conspicuous by their absence for a five- or six-month winter. You can tell a larch in winter from a maple or cottonwood by its coniferous form (single, straight trunk, and symmetrical branching) and from a dead evergreen by its warty texture (pegs on its twigs). The trunks tend to be skinnier than nearby conifers of similar height.
(The other deciduous conifers you might see—not native, but planted in Pacific Northwest cities—are dawn redwoods and bald-cypresses; they’re unrelated to larches but closely related to each other, in family Cupressaceae.)
Relative to other east-slope conifers, larch is fast-growing, long-lived, shade-intolerant, fire-resistant, and water-demanding. Since evergreen competitors photosynthesize through much of winter, a larch has to make up for lost time with high photosynthetic efficiency. This requires full sunlight and ample groundwater through the dry months. Deciduousness helps larches recover from defoliating insects or fires; a larch is going to produce a whole new crop of needles every year anyway. It can afford to have a few grouse munching on its irresistibly tender needles.
Western larch wood is beautifully reddish, strong, and among the most valuable in the Northwest. The tree has few lethal pests or diseases, resists fires, and grows fast once it gets past the first few decades. It looks like an excellent candidate for planting both in and north of its present range.
Western larch
Larix lyallii (lye-ah-lee-eye: for David Lyall, p. 171). Also alpine larch, woolly larch. Needles deciduous, soft, pale green, 1–1½ in., 30–40 in apparent whorls on short peg-like spurs (but on this year’s twigs, needles are single and spirally arranged, and on lowest branches of saplings they are usually evergreen); cones 1½–1¾ in., bristling with pointy bracts much longer than the scales; this year’s twigs densely, minutely woolly; bark gray, rarely more than 1 in. thick; tree broad-crowned, heavily branched or multistemmed; commonly 32 in. dbh × 70 ft. tall; rarely a low shrub; biggest is 7 ft. 1 in. dbh; tallest is 126 ft.—near each other in WA; oldest record 1011 years. 5800–7500 ft., e-side in CasR from Wenatchee Mtns, WA, n to Manning Park, BC. Pinaceae.
Subalpine larch
Though evergreen conifers inhabit colder climates than broadleaf trees, on average, the most cold-loving of all trees are deciduous conifers, the larches. They are the most northerly and the most alpine genus of trees all around the Northern Hemisphere.
Where it is so cold that plants go for months without liquid water for their roots, the winter wind sucks all the moisture (even frozen) out of needles, killing them. Any foliage caught showing above the snow in midwinter gets nipped, so the outlines of evergreen krummholz show summer hikers the depth and shape of the winter snowpack. But in some places we find big subalpine larches growing amid krummholz, their bare branches relatively safe in winter from both cold desiccation and storm breakage.
Sometimes an early frost “freezes” the needles in place through the winter; they drop when they thaw in spring, and are soon replaced. While the tree’s base is still deep in snow, its upper branches leaf out, providing spring’s first greens—a treat for grouse that survived winter on a diet of tough old fir needles. Larch needles taste like tender young grass, with an initial spicy resinous burst. They’re a visual treat, too, contrasting dramatically with other needles twice a year—bright grass-green in June, yellow in late September or October.
On congenial sites, subalpine larches reach impressive sizes, and on tough sites they can live a thousand years. Outcrops of bedrock or talus are typical, since this larch needs to be snow-free by July; that’s on the early side for the Cascades, especially near the crest, which forms the tree’s western limit. Subalpine larches on Luna Peak in Washington are among the botanical signs that the climatic Cascade Crest runs through the Picket Range, not the Skagit-Pasayten divide.
Subalpine larch
This group consists of the cypress family, Cupressaceae. Though the foliage is typically compressed and scalelike at maturity, most family members also have a juvenile phase of sharp, spinelike needles up to ¾ inch long, closely packed along the stem. These differ from other conifer needles in being arranged (like the mature scales) in opposite pairs or in whorls of three. In the three genera we call cedars, juvenile foliage grows only for the seedlings’ first year or two, but in many junipers it continues for years—through sapling size and even into maturity on lower branches. Common juniper is included here to keep the family together; its leaves are all of the “juvenile” spinelike type, never scalelike.
Thuja plicata (thoo-ya: a Greek name for some tree; plic-ay-ta: pleated). Leaves tiny, yellowish green, in opposite pairs, tightly encasing the twig, strongly flattened, the twig or leaf 4–8 times wider than thick; foliage dies after 3–4 years, turning orange-brown but persisting several months before falling; cones about ½ in. long, consisting of 3 opposite pairs of seed-bearing scales, plus a narrow sterile pair at the tip and 0–2 tiny sterile pairs at the base; bark reddish, thin (1 in. or less), peeling in fibrous vertical strips; leader drooping; trunk very tapered, its base fluting and buttressing with age; commonly 7 ft. dbh × 200 ft.; a champion with 19 ft. 8 in. dbh blew down in 2014; greatest ring count 1460 years (older cedars doubtless exist with rotten hearts, which can’t be ring-counted). Moist or wet sites below 4200 ft. Cupressaceae.
Western redcedar
Cedars are manifestly a breed apart, easily recognized (as a family) by their droopy sprays of foliage and vertical-fibrous bark. The bark is relatively clean, being too acidic to encourage lichens, fungi, or moss. Though slow-growing, our cedars resist windthrow, rot, and insect attack, and commonly live over 1000 years. Western redcedars can develop buttressed waistlines 30 to 60 feet around.
Pure stands of redcedar can occur on ground too wet for other big trees, or they can develop very slowly where moist forests go more than 1000 years without fire. That is the case over much of the Olympic Peninsula’s coastal plain, and in many coastal forests of British Columbia, where redcedar is the provincial tree. The Olympic populations are decimated and the British Columbia ones are heading the same way: cedar is being logged disproportionately, and it does not reseed itself effectively.
Scattered individuals are fairly widespread region-wide. Once established, they are too tolerant to shade out, and they also tend to make the soil more alkaline, which favors redcedar seedlings over hemlocks. East of the crests, their soil moisture requirement—about 12 percent through August—limits them to year-round seeps, typically in ravines. As long as their roots are wet, they can venture into drier climates than hemlocks or silver firs. Western redcedar branches and fallen trunks in contact with earth can produce roots and stems that grow into new trees.
Western redcedar
Redcedar stood at the crux of Northwest Coast culture. Easy to work with stone tools and fire, the wood made up in durability and aesthetics what it lacked in strength. Cedar canoes up to 60 feet long by 8 feet wide enabled trade, war, and whaling to flourish along the coast. They took a long time to make. Chisels and fire were used for felling, fire and adzes for hollowing, then the hollow was filled with water and heated with hot rocks until the canoe was flexible enough to widen by inserting thwarts. Cedars were rarely felled, though. For houses, planks up to 33 feet long were split out from standing live cedars, using wedges of yew wood or antler. Thin planks were steamed and bent into boxes—a stellar art medium along with baskets woven from cedar and spruce roots. Cedar branches were softened in water until they could be twined into ropes strong enough to tow dead whales. Cedar bark was stripped, shredded with deer bone, and put to more uses than any other part of the tree: roofing, warm clothing, soft cradle lining, menstrual pads, floor mats, blankets, hats, dishes, among others.
Buds, twigs, seeds, leaves, and bark had medicinal uses. Cedar charms sanctified or warded off spirits of the recently deceased. Cedar bough switches were skin scrubbers for both routine and ceremonial bathing. A Lummi boy preparing for his spirit quest would rub himself with cedar switches, then tie them to the top of a cedar tree.
Western redcedar
Surprisingly, Northwest cultures have put redcedar to all these uses for only about 3500 years. Pollen in buried sediments shows that redcedar was uncommon here before a small climatic cooling around 5500 years ago. It took another 2000 years for big specimens to become common, and for people to learn how to reduce them to usable pieces. That transformative advance together with another one they made at around the same time—preserving salmon—set them on the path to becoming one of the richest and most artistic cultures north of Mexico.
Cedar heartwood is warm red, weathering to silver-gray; it smells wonderful, resists rot, and splits very straight if it comes from an old, slow-grown tree. Shakes of split cedar made superlative roofs in pioneer days. Flammability makes them a poor choice today, considering all the alternatives and the overexploitation of the old cedar resource.
Callitropsis nootkatensis (cali-trop-sis: resembling genus Callitris; nootka-ten-sis: of Nootka, BC). Also yellow-cedar; Chamaecyparis nootkatensis, Xanthocyparis nootkatensis, Cupressus nootkatensis. Leaves tiny, bluish green, encasing twig but diverging from it at the sharp tips, prickly feeling, the twig or leaf up to twice as wide as it is thick; foliage turns brown after 2 years but persists another year before falling; cones round, less than ½ in., like hard green bumpy berries their first year, brown and woody the second year and opening into 4–8 scales like tiny shields with a central prickle; bark thin, silvery gray, red-brown inside and on saplings, flaking in thin strips; leader and branch tips very droopy; mature bases fluted; trees commonly 4 ft. dbh × 130 ft., or alpine krummholz. A biggest tree 13 ft. 8 in. dbh × 200 ft. fell in 2010; greatest ring count is 1834. Moist subalpine forest, wet n aspects, avalanche tracks. Cupressaceae.
Alaska cedar
The name “weeping cedar” suggests itself for this lovely tree whose willowy branches slough snow. Flexibility minimizes snow breakage, whether from accumulation on the limbs, snow creep on a slope, or avalanches. Alaska cedar fills the upper parts of many avalanche tracks, while lower down it is likely outnumbered by faster-growing Sitka alders. Soggy, steep north slopes with devil’s club and sword ferns typify Alaska cedar habitat, but it is also found on dry, rocky, exposed ridgetops. Apparently it selects not wet sites but poor ones, as it grows too slowly to thrive with vigorous competition.
A spell of sunny weather while the soil is frozen may kill upper parts of the tree, bleaching them to white “spike-tops.” The wood resists rot and insects so well that wood in snags dead for 80 years is just as strong as it ever was.
Alaska cedar cone
Alaska cedar is probably the longest-lived plant in the Pacific Northwest. Proof of that may never arrive, as the oldest cedars have heart rot, which prevents complete ring counts. It was not given a place among the world’s giants until 1989, when the first of several huge specimens was found on Vancouver Island. Measured by volume, only seven conifer species (and only three in Canada) can best the champion Alaska cedar.
Alaska cedar wood is much harder and heavier than western redcedar, and clear pale yellow with faint annual rings. Its durability when soaked led Alaskans to use it for fishing boats, the US Navy for small craft during World War II, the Japanese for temples, Oregonians for hot tubs, and the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian for canoes, paddles, and mortuary (“totem”) poles. Indians found the inner bark even softer and finer than western redcedar’s; they stripped, soaked, and pounded it for weaving and plaiting into clothing, bedding, or rope. Little Alaska cedar is logged in Oregon or Washington, but much is logged in coastal British Columbia and Alaska and shipped to Japan because of its close resemblance to the revered hinoki (Chamaecyparis obtusa).
Alaska cedar
In the lower part of its elevational range in coastal Alaska and into British Columbia, Alaska cedar has been gradually dying off and failing to regenerate. Researchers blame this on a warming climate, but not on anthropogenic warming, since it began around 1880, the end of the Little Ice Age. Paradoxically, the trees are dying of cold because of warmer winters. In wet soils, a cold snap can damage the tree’s shallow roots when they lack a good winter blanket of snow. Either of two conditions can protect the cedars: well-drained soil or a snowpack deep enough to outlast the cold weather each spring. In our range the species fortunately grows mainly in well-drained soil.
You can find four different genus names for this species even in very recent publications. Its first scientific name, in 1824, treated it as a cypress, Cupressus nootkatensis. Over most of the next two centuries it was placed instead with Port Orford cedar, in Chamaecyparis. The current brouhaha erupted after a new species was discovered deep in the jungles of Vietnam. Its discoverers coined a new genus name, Xanthocyparis, for it together with Alaska cedar. That event landed in the midst of debates over what are the closest relationships among those two, Port Orford cedar, Juniperus, and Eurasian and California cypresses. The name Callitropsis turned up in a musty, little-read nineteenth-century publication, and has priority if Alaska cedar warrants a genus to itself, and potentially also if it is combined with California cypresses.
Alaska cedar
Calocedrus decurrens (cal-o-see-drus: beautiful cedar; de-cur-enz: running down). Also Libocedrus decurrens. Leaves small, average ¼ in. but up to ¾ in. on large twigs, yellowish green, tightly encasing the twig, flattened, the twig or leaf 3–6 times wider than thick, in opposite pairs that combine as whorls of 4; cones about 1 in., of apparently only 3 scales; seeds with 2 unequal wings; bark red-brown weathering grayish, fibrous but smooth, furrowed, up to 4 in. thick; leader erect; crown typically dense and neatly conical; commonly 40 in. dbh × 140 ft. Record trees are in sw OR: one 15 ft. dbh; one 229 ft. tall; one possibly 933 years old. Sunny slopes below 4000 ft.; OR CasR and on Marys Peak. Cupressaceae.
Incense cedar
Incense cedar’s aroma takes some of us back to school days when we first sharpened pencils. Ticonderoga pencils are still made from incense cedar. The lumber often has fine parallel, linear holes left in it by a shelf fungus, Tyromyces amarus. Fashions in some decades found that defect attractive.
Outliers of a primarily Californian range, our incense cedars grow on hot dry sites in Oregon. Not quite as fire-resistant as Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine, they may increase in between fires.
A year-old incense cedar seedling displays several juvenile leaf styles. First come the two cotyledons, or “seed leaves,” about 1 inch by ⅛ inch. Above these grow needles half as large, in whorls of four. As soon as the seedling branches, it graduates to scalelike, close-packed foliage.
Incense cedar
Juniperus occidentalis (ju-nip-er-us: the Roman name; ox-i-den-tay-lis: western). Mature leaves tiny, scalelike, yellowish green, tightly encasing the twig in whorls of 3, each whorl rotated 60 degrees; juvenile leaves (on seedlings, saplings, lowest limbs of young trees) needlelike, average ¼ in., prickly; cones berrylike, blue to blue-black, rather dry, resinous, 1- to 3-seeded, ¼ in.; bark red-brown, fibrous, shreddy; dense small pyramidal trees commonly 18 in. dbh × 30 ft., with limbs nearly to the ground; or shrubs. Dry low e-side, OR; Klickitat and possibly Chelan Counties, WA. Cupressaceae.
Western juniper
These are dry-country trees with no defense against fire; their strategy is to grow where fire can’t reach them—where there’s too little vegetation to spread it. After reaching large size, a juniper tree can survive some low fires because its own shade and litter create a small grass-free firebreak.
In central Oregon, this species has spread dramatically over the past 130 years, with sweeping effects on hydrology, erosion, and ecology. The spread is often attributed to fire suppression, but another theory blames livestock grazing for reducing the cover of grasses, which can outcompete juniper seedlings.
Western juniper
A tree with a diameter of 12 feet 9 inches and a height of 86 feet, in the Sierra Nevada, is widely listed as the biggest western juniper; another one there died at 2675 years of age, which puts the species in fourth place among longest-lived tree species. However, a top juniper expert reclassified those Sierra Nevada junipers as a new species, J. grandis. Western junipers by the new narrower definition are not so big, but still do get on in years. One in Oregon’s Ochoco Mountains is about 1600 years old.
Junipers are richly aromatic with insect-repellent and disinfectant chemistry. Native Americans boiled juniper leaves to steam sickness out of a house, or to bathe a sick person in juniper leaf tea.
Similar Rocky Mountain juniper, J. scopulorum, with 4-angled stems, occurs in a few spots near Ross Lake and the dry sides of the Olympics and Vancouver Island.
Western juniper
Juniperus communis (com-you-nis: common). Leaves all ¼–¾ in., sharp, curved upward, closely packed along the twig in whorls of 3, from a distinct joint at each leaf base (unlike juvenile J. occidentalis, whose 3-whorled needles bend sharply, with no joint, to run down the twig); cones berrylike, blue-black with bloom, round and quite fleshy, ¼–⅜ in., 1–3-seeded, resinous but sweet; bark red-brown, thin, shreddy; our variety a prostrate, mat-forming shrub. Mainly alpine here. Cupressaceae.
Common juniper
One of the world’s most widespread conifer species, common juniper is humble, but well suited to cold windswept ridges and slopes where even tall conifer species grow as low creeping krummholz.
Junipers are anomalous among conifers in enclosing their seeds in fleshy, edible fruits. (Yews cup—but do not enclose—their poisonous seeds in “berries”). Properly speaking, a berry is a fruit and a fruit is a thickened ovary wall, so neither junipers nor yews have true berries; juniper berries are technically cones of very few, fleshy, fused scales. They have a sweetish resiny flavor of suspiciously medicinal intensity. Used with restraint, they’re a delicious seasoning in teas, stuffings, gin (a word derived from the French ginevre, for juniper), or your water bottle, if your water is getting stale. Those with inquisitive palates will try them straight off the bush. Look for the year-old ones: under the glaucous coating, they ripen blackish. They’re too strong to feature significantly in human diets, but birds love them, and disseminate the indigestible seeds.
Common juniper
