The Douglas Fir of the English Garden

At forty metres, only one other tree in Caserta's register stands as tall, and this one's stated age does not quite work. The Campania register gives it about two hundred years, which would mean a planting around 1826. David Douglas did not send the first seed of the species back from the Pacific Northwest until 1827, and it spread through European gardens over the decades that followed, so two hundred is the outer edge of what is possible and is more likely a round number than a measurement. The tree itself is not in doubt. Five metres eighty around the trunk, forty metres of it, with the thick corky grey bark split into broad plates, which is armour: in its native range the species survives ground fire that kills its neighbours because that bark insulates the trunk. Douglas fir is the timber tree of the American west, the one that built ships, bridges and most of Oregon, and nineteenth-century Europe planted it hard for exactly that reason. Here it does no work at all. It stands in the middle of a landscape garden designed to look wild and engineered to the last stone, alongside a cedar, a cork oak and a plane from three other continents, all of them collected for a queen who wanted a botanical garden and got one.