The Five Brothers

Thirty-nine metres in about fifty years. That is the whole case for these firs, and it is a good one: they are among the youngest trees on this page, about fifty years old, and they are already taller than almost everything around them. Work it out and the crown has gone up something like three quarters of a metre a year, every year, without a pause. Abies grandis is not a French tree. It comes from the Pacific Northwest, from Oregon and British Columbia, where it grows in high rainfall and grows fast, and European foresters have planted it since the 19th century for exactly the behaviour on display here. The trunk is 110 centimetres through at the base. Les cinq freres, the five brothers, is the local name, and the register does not actually say how many stems there are or whether they are fused at the foot or simply five trees that came up together. Nobody in this pass has stood underneath to check. If you get there first, tell us what you see. They stand a short way inside parcelle 73, among broadleaf trees, which is what makes the height obvious.