NOTES ON THE DOUGLAS FIR. 



13 



3. Notes on the Douglas Fir. 



( inth Plates and Tables.) 

 By P. Leslie. 



In travelling as far westwards as the Rocky Mountains and 

 Pacific Coast when I was in North America, in the autumn of 

 1920, I had a two-fold object in view. I was desirous of 

 acquiring a knowledge, gained at first hand, of the forest 

 conditions of Western America, and also of obtaining supplies 

 of seed for research work in the forestry experiment station 

 at Craibstone, Aberdeen, the estate belonging to the North of 

 Scotland College of Agriculture, where there are 250 acres of 

 woodland used for educational purposes. 



In forestry experiment stations, it is usual to plant small 

 woods or plots of geographical races or varieties of the 

 commoner and more useful forest trees for the purposes of 

 systematic study, and of ascertaining their merits as commercial 

 forest trees. This holds good both of native and of exotic 

 species, and it is natural that an endeavour should be made 

 to have a series of plots illustrating the geographical races of 

 those Pacific Coast trees, the planting of which has been 

 attended with such satisfactory results, that they are likely 

 in the future to play an increasingly important part in British 

 forestry. 



As a result of my visit to North America there have been 

 gathered together in the nurseries at Craibstone stocks of 

 Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and other species collected in different 

 parts of the range of each tree, which are likely to be of the 

 greatest value for research work, since the conditions of the 

 regions in which the seed was collected are definitely known. 

 In this paper I propose dealing with the varieties of Douglas 

 fir that are represented in the Craibstone nurseries, leaving 

 over for future contributions what I have to say about the 

 other species. 



At the time I set out on the tour, the knowledge I possessed 

 of the progress that had been made in elucidating the relation- 

 ship of the different varieties of the Douglas fir, and in 

 determining their geographical distribution, did not include 

 much of the information that is embodied in the latest publica- 

 tions on the subject. It was not until my return, that I had 



