As there were no cones on any of the firs on this side of Mount Rainier in 1904 I was unable to procure seed of either of these species, though Prof. Allen sent me both of them in 1905.
The wood is yellowish and can, according to Plummer, be distinguished from that of A. lasiocarpa, by its darker colour. It is soft and perishable, and of no commercial importance at the present time.
Abies amabilis was discovered in 1825 by Douglas on a high mountain south of the Grand Rapids of the Columbia River ; but it was not until 1830 that he succeeded in sending to England seed, from which a few plants were raised in the garden of the Horticultural Society at Chiswick; and of these original trees hardly any now survive. For many years afterwards the tree was not seen by any traveller or collector; and seeds of reputed A. amabilis sent to Europe invariably turned out to be some other species; and much confusion resulted in the nomenclature of the western American silver firs. In 1880 the tree was re-discovered by Sargent in company with Engelmann and Parry, who found it on Silver Mountain near Fort Hope on the Fraser River; and a few days later Sargent himself observed it on the mountain where it had first been seen by Douglas. Large supplies of seed were sent from Oregon in 1882, and young trees are not now uncommon.
Remarkable Trees
Of the original trees, those raised from seed sent home by Douglas, Kent knew only of two surviving in 1900, one at Dropmore and another at Orton Longueville. The latter, as I was told by Mr. Harding, was cut down in 1905, when it measured 5 feet 9 inches in girth.
The tree at Dropmore, which was received from the Royal Horticultural Society, and planted in 1835, was cut down four years ago. Mr. Page informs us that the trunk in the timber yard measured 36 feet long by 8 feet 4 inches in girth at 5 feet from the lower end. A cutting from the tree was raised in 1847 by the late Mr. Frost, and is now growing at Dropmore, and measures 50 feet high by 7 feet 3 inches. Fora time, up to 1873, it promised to be a better tree than its parent ; but it is now a miserable object, being badly affected by “knotty” disease.’ This disease has attacked also all the young trees of this species at Dropmore, some fourteen or fifteen in number, which were planted a few years ago.
1 Dr. Masters, in Gard. Chron. xvii. 812, xviii. 109, figs. 19, 20 (1882) states that Mr. Barron had proved the gouty swellings on branchlets of A. amabilis and A. nobilis to be due to a woolly aphis, and had succeeded in killing the pest, in his nursery at Borrowash, by applications of fir-tree oil. A petroleum emulsion is recommended in Gard. Chron. xxvii. 190 (1900). I am indebted to Prof. Borthwick of Edinburgh for a paper on the subject (in Nat. Zeitschr. Forst. u. Landwirthschaft, 1908, p. 151, figs. 1–4) by Dr. E. Wolz, who states that these swellings are caused by a Chermes which Cholodkovsky has named C. piceæ, var. Bouvieri. The life-history of this insect does not seem to have been fully worked out; and it may not be identical with the Chermes piceæ, which attacks the bark of silver firs, and is said by Gillanders (Forest Entomology, 333) to be common in the nursery on young plants of A. pectinata and of A. Nordmanniana. The figures given by Wolz, however, of Abies nobilis, attacked by the disease, represent exactly the swellings which I have seen on that species at Carlisle, and which is present on most of the trees of A. amabilis in England. E.R. Burdon, in Journal of Economic Biology, 1908, ii. 132, states that Cholodkovsky’s drawing looks more like the effect attributed to Æcidium elatinum. Cf. Hartig, Diseases of Trees, 180, fig. 109 (1894), who states that no formation of spores ever takes place on these swellings.
