By Priscilla Long If you’ve been in the Pacific Northwest you’ve
seen a Douglas-fir. It’s a conifer of course—needles and cones.
It’s our main tree and it grows in woods, in city parks, and on
the street. In the woods it grows straight and tall and the
lower branches stick straight out from the trunk like a many-
armed man being frisked. But the tree is self-pruning, so what
you often have in a younger tree is a straight-up trunk with
knots where branches once grew, the needled top susurrus in the
wind. To know for sure you’re standing under a Doug-fir, look at
the oval-shaped cones on the ground. They have thin unmistakable
three-pointed bracts sticking up between the scales. Why learn a
tree at all? A tree is a tree, right? Yet any one object, when
scrutinized, opens the door to its worlds. To its type and its
form and its way of life. To its deep past and if it’s alive, to
its reproductive and genetic history. The Doug-fir (Pseudotsuga
menziesii) is not actually a fir tree, and it’s incorrect to
refer to it