Douglas Fir, Feshiebridge, Strathspey
A visit to one of my favourite trees in the district – a beautiful Douglas Fir standing on the rocky banks where the River Feshie tumbles through a wee gorge.
The tree is named after David Douglas, the Scottish botanist who first ‘discovered’ it in British Columbia and the Western USA. It is reportedly the second-tallest conifer in the world, after the Rewdwoods, and specimens have been found older than 1000 years. This one is just a baby – planted in the 19th century when the seeds were first brought to this country. Nonetheless it has a beautiful, incredible presence which feels so gentle and strong under its protective branches.
“In the Pacific Northwest I met a man who had schooled himself in the speech of needled evergreens; on a breezy day you could drive him, blindfolded, to any patch of coastal forest and place him, still blind, beneath a particular tree — after a few moments he would tell you, by listening, just what species of pine or spruce or fir stood above him (whether he stood beneath a Douglas fir or a grand fir, a Sitka spruce or a western red cedar). His ears were attuned, he said, to the different dialects of the trees.”
– David Abram ‘Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology’