Fir cones stand up like candles and fall apart on the branch
Look up at a fir and you will never find a whole cone on the ground beneath it. Unlike spruce cones, which dangle, fir cones sit upright on the branches and crumble in place when ripe, releasing winged seeds to the wind. Some of these trees approach 100 metres tall.
Firs form the genus Abies in the pine family, with roughly 48 to 65 living species depending on who is counting. Aljos Farjon accepted 48 species in 1990 and 2001 and trimmed that to 46 in 2017, while Debreczy and Racz argued for 67 in 2011; Plants of the World Online listed 49 as of September 2025. Their closest relative is Keteleeria, a small genus of eastern Asia. The English word descends from Old Norse or Old Danish, while Abies is simply Latin for fir.
A few traits separate firs from other conifers. Each needle attaches singly to the twig by a round, sucker-like base, leaving a small pit, and usually twists so its pores face downward. Branches grow in whorls around a single straight trunk, often 40 to 60 metres tall. Female cones, 5 to 25 centimetres long, take a year to mature, often starting bright green or purple before darkening. Male cones hang like catkins.
The genus is ancient: pollen from Siberia dates to the Late Cretaceous, and leaves and cones appear across the Northern Hemisphere from the Eocene. Firs favour cold places, at altitude or high latitude, from 67 degrees north in Siberia to 15 degrees north in Guatemala, and range across North America, Eurasia, Morocco and Algeria. Many species survive as relics in small pockets of formerly vast ranges. In Mexico, the sacred fir provides winter roosts for migrating monarch butterflies.
People use fir timber for paper pulp, plywood and interior building, and several species become Christmas trees or ornamentals prized for colourful cones. In 1510 Lucas Cranach the Elder painted his Madonna under the fir tree for Wroclaw Cathedral. Firs also suffer from a long list of pests, including bark beetles, aphids and adelgids, and from diseases such as root rot and needle cast.
Source: Fir
