Douglas Fir

The tallest tree in Portland is 74 metres. This page maps every douglas fir on the site, 8 so far across 7 cities.

The tallest tree in Brussels is 33, and it is the same species. That gap is not about care or soil, it is about home ground: Douglas fir grows wild down the Pacific coast, and the one in Portland's Balch Creek canyon is simply standing where it belongs. Everywhere else it is an import with a hard start date, since seed only left the Pacific Northwest for Europe in 1827. Caserta's register claims about two hundred years for its forty metre specimen, which would put it in the ground the year before that, so read the figure as a round number. Hobart's went into the botanical gardens in 1894, seven years before the Australian colonies became a country. Brussels' grew up beside a racecourse that had two grandstands by 1878.

Brussels

The Douglas Fir of the Hippodrome

up to 150 years · Watermael-Boitsfort

The tallest tree in Brussels grows on what used to be a racecourse.

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Guimaraes

The Douglas Fir of Monte da Penha

roughly 90 years · Monte da Penha

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...

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Caserta

The Douglas Fir of the English Garden

the register says about 200 years, which is the outer edge of possible · Giardino Inglese, il Palco

At forty metres, only one other tree in Caserta's register stands as tall, and this one's stated age does not quite work.

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Seattle

Sylvia

about 600 years · Holmes Point, Kirkland

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.

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Seward Park's Big Tree

roughly 400 to 500 years · Seward Park

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.

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