The tallest tree in Brussels grows on what used to be a racecourse.
Douglas Fir
Pseudotsuga menziesii
Douglas fir grows wild down the Pacific coast of North America, and at home it is enormous and old. We map 15 of them, in 11 cities.
Seward Park's Big Tree in Seattle, put at 400 to 500 years, still carries the scars of fires in 1508 and 1701. Sylvia, across Lake Washington, is about eight metres round; a windstorm took her top off in 1993 and she has been growing a candelabra of new ones since. The Doerner Fir near Coos Bay is 84 metres tall, and Portland's Balch Creek fir 74. Everywhere else it is an import with a hard start date, since seed only left the Pacific Northwest for Europe in 1827, and it still outgrows the locals. Germany's tallest tree is Waldtraut vom Mühlwald, a Douglas fir planted near Freiburg in 1913 and measured at 67.85 metres in 2024. Hobart's went into the botanical gardens in 1894.
Brussels
Seattle
Sylvia was the biggest tree in King County until the morning of 20 January 1993, when an inauguration day windstorm came up Lake Washington and took her top off.
Photo: Bri (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Seattle's oldest known tree still carries the burn marks of two fires, one in 1508 and one in 1701, when the Puget lowlands went up and this Douglas fir did not.
This is the Seward Park Douglas fir you can actually find.
Guimaraes
Guimaraes' cable car climbs 1.7 kilometres up Monte da Penha in about ten minutes, and at the top, beside the art-deco sanctuary that gives the mountain its shrine, stands a Douglas fir nobody had...
Hobart
This tree is older than Australia.
Segovia
A tree from the Pacific northwest, at 36.5 metres, over a fountain of dragons.
Caserta
At forty metres, only one other tree in Caserta's register stands as tall, and this one's stated age does not quite work.
Coos Bay
In August 2025 a fire nobody has explained burned for several days in the crown of this Douglas fir, and the tree survived it.
Freiburg
The tallest tree in Germany is not a German species and it is only 116 years old.
Madeira
A Douglas fir has no business in a laurel forest, and this one is 39 metres tall.
Portland
A whole cemetery is named after this one Douglas fir, for a quality it no longer has: being alone.
This Douglas fir is 74 metres tall.
Photo: Jerry Kensler (CC BY)
Portland's register of Heritage Trees measures this Douglas-fir at 166 feet, about 50 metres, and 18.8 feet round, about 5.7 metres, with a trunk 71 inches across.
Spokane
These firs are still standing because they were not worth cutting down.
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