Abies alba

Common Names

European or common silver fir (Silba 1986), abeto (Spanish).

Taxonomic notes

Syn. A. pardei Gaussen (Silba 1986).

Description

Tree up to 45-55 m. tall and 200-260 cm dbh, with a long clear bole surmounted by a pyramidal crown that becomes flat-topped with age. Bark smooth, gray, scaly, with resin blisters. Branches grooved, pale brown or dull gray with a blackish pubescence. Leaves: Shade foliage 2-ranked, spreading horizontally; foliage in sun more or less erect. Needle base twisted, apex notched or rounded; 15-30 × 1.5-2 mm; upper surface dark shiny green and grooved, usually lacking stomata; lower surface glaucous to whitish-green, keeled , with stomata in 5-8 ranks. Buds pale brown to reddish-brown, ovoid with an obtuse apex, sometimes resinous, diameter 8-11 mm, slightly pubescent. Pollen cones blue/violet/red, 1-3 cm long. Seed cones cylindrical, attenuate at the ends, 10-16 × 3-5 cm, green when young, turning red-brown; cone scales spathulate, finely pubescent with exserted, reflexed bracts extending about 2/3 the length of the scale. Seeds obovoid, reddish, winged, up to 2.5 cm long (Silba 1986).

Range

France; Italy; Switzerland; Germany; Austria; Bulgaria; Ukraine: Karpaty Mts.; Byelorussia; at 300-1950 m. (Silba 1986, Vladimir Dinets e-mail 2-Jan-1998); Croatia.

Big Tree

Height 59 m, dbh >320 cm, Chernaya Tisa River, Karpatsky National Reserve (Ukraine?) (Vladimir Dinets e-mail 2-Jan-1998). A tree 45 m tall, dbh 296 m, grows at Strone House, Strathclyde, Great Britain. Another, 50 m tall and 201 cm dbh, is at Raehills, Dumfries & Galloway, Great Britain (Mitchell et al. 1990).

Oldest

A tree-ring chronology covering 411 years, presumably based on living tree material, was collected in 1952 in Bayerischer Wald, Germany (48.75° N, 13.00° E) by B. Becker (Data accessed at the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program Tree-Ring Data Search Page, 24-Feb-1999. URL: http://julius.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ftp-treering.html).

Dendrochronology

Rolland (1993) did an exploratory study; the Bibliography of Dendrochronology provides some 290 additional citations (as of 2006), dating back to 1842, which is interesting (because dendrochronology was officially invented in about 1905) - unfortunately, there are none in English until 1956.

Ethnobotany

Foliar loppings of European silver fir in Czechoslovakia have yielded 1,380 tonnes/year of essential oils (Cermak and Penka 1979).

Observations

Remarks

Citations

Cermak, J. and M. Penka. 1979. An attempt to estimate potential production of volatile terpenes from the logging by-products of silver fir (Abies alba Mill.). Planta Medica 36: 3, 252.

Farjon (1990) provides a detailed account, with illustrations.

Rolland, C. 1993. Tree-ring and climate relationships for Abies alba in the internal Alps. Tree-Ring Bulletin 53:1-11. Available online at www.treeringsociety.org/TRBTRR/TRBvol53_1-11.pdf (accessed 2006.06.05).

See Also