The Douglas Fir of the Dragon Fountain

A tree from the Pacific northwest, at 36.5 metres, over a fountain of dragons. Douglas fir arrived in Britain in 1827 in a consignment of seed sent home by David Douglas, who had spent years walking the Columbia river country collecting, and it spread through European estates as the fastest-growing conifer anybody had tried. In its own range it is the second tallest tree on earth after the coast redwood. Here it is the tallest thing on this page that is not a sequoia, and it stands beside the Fuente de los Dragones in a garden built two centuries before anyone in Spain had heard of it. The register records it as the Pseudotsuga del Dragon and gives no age. That gap is the whole shape of this page: Castilla y Leon listed these trees in 2006 for size and species and never asked how old they were, and nobody has asked since. Given that the garden's conifer collection went in through the nineteenth century, a Douglas fir here would be somewhere between 150 and 180 years old, which is young for a tree and about as old as the species gets outside America.