Douglas fir in Stanley Park is a 600-year-old survivor
When the Douglas fir was a seedling, England’s King Henry V had a great victory over the French at the famous Battle of Agincourt.
Around the same time, construction finished on the Forbidden City in Beijing. As the imperial palace and home of the emperors, it was ceremonial and political centre of China’s government for the next 500 years.
The young Douglas fir was located in what settlers would later call Stanley Park. It survived being eaten by the elk and deer that used to roam in the area. Nearby grew western red cedar trees whose bark
and wood was regularly harvested by the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh, the original inhabitants of this part of the world for thousands of years.
When Europeans logged the peninsula, they took the straightest and best trees. For some reason, they left the Douglas fir behind.
It also survived the Great Fire of 1886, which burned all the way to Beaver Lake and destroyed almost all the buildings in Vancouver.
The tree is located next to Lees Trail, northeast of the intersection of Bridle and Cathedral trails and the covered rest area. You can touch the tree’s bark, which could be 25 centimetres thick or more in parts.
The Douglas fir’s gnarly exterior may be one of the reasons why it survived the fire that burned through the park in the late 19th century, said Bill Stephen, arborist and urban forestry specialist for the Vancouver board of parks and recreation.
“We live in a special region in the world, and Stanley Park is special,” Stephen said while standing next to the ancient Douglas fir.
“This generation of Douglas fir grew up after a fire 600 or 700 years ago.”
Stephen believes it was probably heat from the 1886 fire that caused the tree’s cones to open to release seeds. He pointed to several tall, thin Douglas firs nearby that may be the offspring of the old giant.
“The (fire) spawned the old remnants of the previous fire to drop seeds,” Stephen said. “These are the parents of the new generation of Douglas firs.”
At about 60 metres tall and 2.6 metres in diameter, the old Douglas fir is among the most impressive specimens in Vancouver. But it isn’t the tallest tree in the city — that distinction goes to a second-growth Douglas fir in a nearby grove to the south of Beaver Lake. It has been measured at an impressive 63.6 metres — just under 209 feet.
“This is a real survivor,” Stephen said, pointing to the tree by Lees Trail. “People from other parts of the world go, ‘Wow! That’s a huge tree.’ It’s nothing, really, for Stanley Park. You get used to the big trees here.”
While the Douglas fir stands out because of its size and great age, it’s among tens of thousands of other coniferous and deciduous trees in the park. In Vancouver, it’s one of about 180,000 native and ornamental trees on streets and parks that fall under the jurisdiction of Stephen and the park board.
Stephen sees trees as both individual specimens and as part of a larger urban forest. He also recognizes that people can get very attached to a particular tree.
“People grow up with trees and expect them to be there,” he said. “As children, people climb in them, or one can be a favourite shade tree. People pick their own and it tends to be a personal choice.”
In Queen Elizabeth Park, one of the most popular trees is a Yoshino cherry tree located to the south of Bloedel Conservatory. Considered one of the city’s most beautiful trees for its pink blossoms in spring, it’s grown so famous it’s known as The Great One.
Another is the beautiful red oak in the southwest corner of Alexandra Park at Bidwell and Beach. Named the first Poet Tree in 2013 by Canadian poet laureate Fred Wah, it is one of the city’s widest trees at about 18 metres in diameter.
Stephen said one of his favourite exotic group of trees are in the VanDusen Botanical Garden. In the garden’s northeast corner is a grove of bald cypress trees in a setting that recreates its native bayou river system in the U.S. southeast by the Gulf of Mexico.
As for a native tree, he singled out the arbutus, the broadleaf evergreen with the reddish-brown peeling bark.
“We’re a little moist for arbutus trees,” he said. “We’re not quite within their natural range. We’ve brought them in because we love them so much.”
On a walk through Stanley Park to look at some of the bigger, older trees, Stephen described the park’s forest as a unique mixture of native and ornamental trees. On a regular basis, Stanley Park has been chosen as the No. 1 urban park in the world.
“The forest comes to the city itself, and in other places, the city goes out into the forest,” he said.
People grow up with trees … As children, people climb in them, or one can be a favourite shade tree. People pick their own and it tends to be a personal choice.
“Instead of having a hard line between the forest and the more planned, manicured areas, they fit together. There is a look and feel that is unlike anything else in the world: the beautiful temperate rainforest intermingles with the manicured and ornamental gardens and more urban trees.”
Stephen estimated the park board cares for about 145,000 trees on streets and rights-of-way. There are another 35,000 ornamental trees in city parks.
On top of this, there are tens of thousands of additional trees in the urban forests in Stanley Park, Jericho Beach, Fraserview Golf Course and Everett Crowley Park in the southeast corner of the city, which is being planted with native species by the park board.
“(Everett Crowley) has a long way to go, but we like to joke that in 100 years it will be Stanley Park Southeast,” Stephen said.