Noble Fir

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The Noble Fir (Abies procera) is a western North American fir, native to the Cascade Range and Coast Range mountains of extreme northwest California and western Oregon and Washington in the United States.

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It is a large evergreen tree typically up to 40-70 m tall and 2 m trunk diameter, rarely to 89 m tall and 2.7 m diameter, with a narrow conic crown. The bark on young trees is smooth, grey, and with resin blisters, becoming red-brown, rough and fissured on old trees. The leaves are needle-like, 1-3.5 cm long, glaucous blue-green above and below with strong stomatal bands, and a blunt to notched tip. They are arranged spirally on the shoot, but twisted slightly s-shaped to be upcurved above the shoot. The cones are erect, 11-22 cm long, with the purple scales almost completely hidden by the long exserted yellow-green bract scales; ripening brown and disintegrating to release the winged seeds in fall.

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It is a high altitude tree, typically occurring at 900-2,700 m altitude, though only rarely reaching tree-line.

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It is very closely related to Red Fir (Abies magnifica), which replaces it further southeast in southernmost Oregon and California, being best distinguished by the leaves having a groove along the midrib on the upper side; Red Fir does not show this. Red Fir also tends to have the leaves less closely packed, with the shoot bark visible between the leaves, whereas the shoot is largely hidden in Noble Fir. Red Fir cones also mostly have shorter bracts, except in Abies magnifica var. shastensis; this variety is considered by some botanists to be a hybrid between Noble Fir and Red Fir.

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North America: North America is a continent in the northern hemisphere, bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the south by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific Ocean. It covers an area of 9,355,000 square miles (24,230,000 square kilometers). In 2...

Fir: FIR may stand for:...

Cascade Range: The Cascade Range is a mountainous region famous for its chain of tall volcanoes called the High Cascades that run north-south along the west coast of North America from British Columbia to the Shasta Cascade area of northern California. The small part of the range in British Columbia is called the...

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