Thank you to Dair Mor who placed this cache, and many others throughout Perthshire, in 2010.
The tree we know as the Douglas fir is indisputably one of the most important forest trees of North America, and is now quite a significant timber tree in the UK. For many its name celebrates the efforts of the renowned plant hunter and ‘scientific traveller’ David Douglas (1799 - 1834) who introduced hundreds of tree, shrub and flower species to Europe.
The story goes that Douglas in turn commemorated the earlier, legendary Perthshire botanist Archibald Menzies by giving this species its scientific name of Pseudotsuga menziesii, as it was he who first collected specimens from Vancouver Island in 1792. (Except that it wasn’t Vancouver Island until HMS Discovery returned to Blighty and Captain George Vancouver published his journals of the voyage.)
Douglas undoubtedly wanted to give Menzies credit for the earlier discovery. But there are rules, lad. The name by which we now know this magnificent tree is but the latest in a long line of learned pronouncements . . .
In the 1880s Thomas Hunter, whose Woods, Forests and Estates of Perthshire is the earliest express ion of this area as Big Tree Country, said of these very trees “ A good many Abies douglasii have been planted out and are doing well.” In describing them as ‘Abies’ he was following scientific orthodoxy of the time. He also calls them elsewhere ‘Oregon pine’, a name that stuck for a while.
In fact, it was not until 1950 that the scientific establishment settled on Pseudotsuga menziesii. For now.
This cache is one of many to be hidden gradually from now until the Mega 2010 Perth. A series of caches to be hidden right in the heart of Perthshire Big Tree Country. More information can be found by clicking on the banner and the website above.