Douglas Fir

The Douglas Fir originates from the west coast of North America. It can be found over a long coastal band of more than 2,000 km (from British Columbia to California).





The Douglas Fir becoming a resource in France was the fruit of a two-century journey which started in 1792 when a British naturalist, Archibald Menzies, identified the Douglas Fir during Captain Vancouver’s mission to explore the Pacific coast of North America.


Thirty years later (in 1823), the Horticultural Society of London tasked David Douglas, a young Scot passionate about botany, with exploring the forests of the future states of Washington and Oregon and bringing back seeds and plants. He carried out his task so diligently that in just a few years he was able to convince the British scientific community of the importance of the Douglas Fir to which his name would henceforth be attached.


The Douglas Fir developed rapidly among the European aristocracy (in France and in Germany) who initially adopted it for aesthetic and ornamental purposes in parks and gardens, then experimented successfully with it in reforestation in the second half of the 19th century.
Introduced in France in 1842, the Douglas Fir was the subject of the first reforestation work at the end of the 19th century. These afforestations led to the establishment of benchmarks which, one century later, convinced the Fonds Forestier National (FFN - National Forestry Fund) to adopt it in turn. Starting in 1965-1970, thanks to its excellent capacity to adapt to the mid-mountain territory in central France, the Douglas Fir gradually became the main reforestation species for the Massif Central.