Arborists Lincoln and Shea after collecting the Santa Lucia fir cones. (Photo: Joanna Long)
Seattle Botanic Gardens arborists Shea Cope and Lincoln Erbeck are quite the dynamic duo. They spend much of their time ensuring that the thousands of trees growing in the Arboretum are healthy and safe—one arborist skillfully climbing and pruning in the canopy, while the other acts as a spotter, monitoring the climber’s movements and safety from the ground. They also work with other horticulture staff to locate trees that are hazardous to the public—due to disease or old age—and safely take them down.
Sometimes, though, our arborists are called on to join the front lines of plant conservation, and they happily oblige. In late August, both Shea and Lincoln used climbing ropes and a lot of muscle to scale a 108-foot-foot Santa Lucia fir (Abies bracteata) in the Arboretum to collect seed cones from the top of the tree, with a trained horticulturist, Hannah Evans, spotting from below. The seeds were then sent to conservation partners in California’s central coast to help with restoration of wild populations of the species.
A Rare and Beautiful Oddball
Santa Lucia fir is the rarest fir species in North America. It grows in only one place on Earth: the cool canyons and windswept ridges of the northern Santa Lucia Mountains above Big Sur. Because of its restricted range, fragmented populations, and susceptibility to fire, the species is classified as “near threatened” by the International Union for Conservation.
Shea and Lincoln using a ladder to ascend to the lowest branches of the fir. (Photo: Sarah Hilbert)
Growing up to 160 feet tall with a narrow, pyramidal habit, Santa Lucia fir is a beautiful conifer but a bit of an oddball among fir (Abies) species. Fir needles are typically short and soft, but the needles of Santa Lucia fir grow up to two-and-a-half inches long and are hard, wide, and very sharp at the tip. (Bravo, again, to Shea and Lincoln, for braving this particular assignment—though Shea didn’t think the needles were that bad!)
The three-inch-wide seed cones are also unique among firs. The scales of the cones produce very elongated, spine-like bracts (modified leaves), giving rise to the species’ other common name, “bristlecone fir.” In the literature, experts have described the cones as looking like “angry porcupines” and “roosting hedgehogs.”
Complicating seed collection efforts, the female cones almost always crowd together at the very top of the tree’s crown. “I only found them on the top 15 to 20 feet of the tree,” says Shea. “Many conifers will produce their female seed cones at the top to improve wind pollination, prevent self-pollination, and provide better seed spread.”
The Santa Lucia fir’s unusually large and sharp foliage, plus its thin bark. (Photo: Niall Dunne)
Wildfire and Climate Warming
Unlike many West Coast conifer species, Santa Lucia fir has thin bark, which makes it susceptible to fire. Historically, the tree has escaped the attention of wildfires by living in steep, rocky, high-elevation, and fire-resistant sites that don’t accumulate much flammable litter. However, as wildfires have grown larger, hotter, more frequent, and more unpredictable due to climate change, the tree’s historic refugia have become less and less reliable.
In 2020, the Dolan Fire severely damaged two significant groves of Santa Lucia fir near Cone Peak, a spectacular mountain on the Big Sur coast. In response, a local environmental non-profit, the Ventana Wilderness Alliance, started an initiative in partnership with UC Santa Cruz Arboretum to collect seed from mature, cone-bearing trees near Cone Peak, with the goal of growing seedlings off site and planting dozens of young trees back at the two fire-impacted groves.
Unfortunately, another wildfire in the area this year, the Timber Fire, hampered access to the Cone Peak sites. The project partners turned to local arboreta and public gardens in central California for help as potential seed sources; however, the Santa Lucia firs at these gardens were having an off year. (Heavy cone crops tend to be cyclical for this species—every three to five years.) This is where Seattle Botanic Gardens came in to lend a hand.
Shea using the tree branches as a ladder to climb. (Photo: Sarah Hilbert)
Botanic Gardens as Genetic Repositories
The Santa Lucia fir has been in cultivation since the mid-19th century. Because of its adaptation to wet winters and dry summers, it does well in the Puget Sound region. The Washington Park Arboretum has three towering specimens, all growing close together on the slope between the Pacific Connections Garden meadow and the Loop Trail.
Two of the specimens date to 1956 and came to us as young plants from John Dreucker, a distinguished nurseryman based in Fort Bragg, California. This pair are about 120 feet tall, with single leading stems, and they can easily seen from the Loop Trail. The third specimen is older, dating to 1949, but is shorter, perhaps due to it having had its leading stem split into three at a relatively young age. This specimen came to us as seed from the U.S. Institute of Forest Genetics, in Placerville, California, and the seed was sourced in the wild from the Santa Lucia Mountains.
In August, Leor Pantalit, a board member of the Ventana Wilderness Alliance happened to be visiting Seattle and spotted our specimens of Santa Lucia fir while on a walk in the Arboretum. The tops of the trees were loaded with seed cones. Leor contacted our horticulture staff, explained the recovery project, and asked about the possibility of collecting cones from our specimens.
Our team sprang into action. Shea and Lincoln donned their helmets and gathered their climbing gear. Leor was very excited to learn about the older specimen and its wild provenance, so this was the tree the arborist team focused on for cone collection.
The mature cones at the top of the trees. (Photo: Shea Cope)
A Sappy Ending
“To ascend the tree, we used standard MRS (moving-rope-system) climbing techniques with 200-foot ropes,” says Shea, “and used the branches like a ladder, while advancing the rope—always maintaining at least one tie-in point.” When the two got close to the top, the trunk diameter narrowed to four inches in width, and only the smaller-built Shea advanced so that he could collect cones safely without damaging the tree.
“The three codominant stems actually gave me some extra footings and hand holds which was helpful,” says Shea. “However, I had to fight through a thicket of small, dead branches between them, which I pruned out as I ascended.” Shea plucked the cones by hand, filling two small grocery bags, before beginning the descent. One thing that really surprised him and Lincoln was the copious amount of resin the cones produce!
“We couldn’t believe how unbelievably sticky the cones were with sap,” he says. “Each one- to two-inch bristle protruding from the cones had a pea-sized glob of glistening sap at the tip, which would stick to anything it touched. I’ve never had more sap on my gloves, chest, and face, in my 13 years of climbing as an arborist! It even soaked through my t-shirt in some areas. This also made stuffing the cones in the bags pretty interesting. They were all stuck together in a huge ball at the end.”
Staff at UC Santa Cruz Arboretum processing the seed cones. (Photo: Lucy Ferneyhough)
The cones were shipped to our new colleagues in California, and hopefully the seed they extract will propagate well at UC Santa Cruz Arboretum greenhouses and help support restoration efforts for this amazing, rare fir. The first batch of cones we sent may not have been ripe enough at harvest, so Shea and Lincoln will be ascending the tree again soon to collect more mature cones.
Safeguarding rare, threatened, and endangered plant species through off-site (or “ex-situ”) conservation is a key function of botanic gardens. At the Washington Park Arboretum, we maintain more than 100 threatened tree and shrub species in our living conservation collection, helping prevent extinction of these species in the wild and supporting reintroduction of the plants into their natural habitats.
“At Seattle Botanic Gardens, stewardship means caring not only for the plants in our own collections but also showing up for fellow botanic gardens and conservation organizations when they need a hand,” says Horticulture Manager Joanna Long. “Healthy ecosystems across landscapes depend on connection, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.”
Niall Dunne is the communications manager at Seattle Botanic Gardens.
Extracted Santa Lucia fir seed at UCSC Arboretum. (Photo: Lucy Ferneyhough)
Resources
- Fryer, Janet L. 2020. Abies bracteata, bristlecone fir. In: Fire Effects Information System. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory.
- Christian, T. 2021. Abies bracteata from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (International Dendrology Society).
