In February 1920 the American Forestry Magazine ran the all-capital headline “DISCOVERY OF SUGAR ON DOUGLAS FIR”. The opening paragraphs of the article is worth reading for the pulsing excitement:
Long before the first white man came to North America with his luxuries of sugar and tea and other food delicacies which today the Indians love, and long for when without, the Indians of at least one district on this great continent had a white sugar of a very rare and high quality, a sugar derived from the strangest, and an almost unbelievable source – from the foliage of the Douglas fir tree, growing in certain districts in the Province of British Columbia, Canada.
Yet, remarkable as this botanical phenomenon is, the existence of sugar in such an unusual place as the foliage of a coniferous tree seems to have entirely escaped the attention of all the white traders, explorers, surveyors, missionaries and hunters who passed through the regions where it is found. At least no mention of it has ever come to light; nothing seems to have been written of it by those early pioneering whites who traveled through the region where the trees produce this sugar; and, undoubtedly, had these men known of it, they would most certainly have made some mention, because of the very unusualness of the occurrence.1
There are some good reasons for this excitement! Sugar shortages were a serious problem in the 1920s so it was a big deal to have a potential alternative on the west coast.
There was also the mind-boggling discovery at the time that a coniferous tree – acidic trees that were never a source of sweet things with their wooden cones – had an untapped, easily accessible, and in high-demand food source. Finally, there was the confusion how European Settlers missed picking up this important piece of ecological information from the landscape or from indigenous people for so long.
(Looking at this a hundred years later, the arrogance of the surprise of not knowing indigenous ecological knowledge is a bit laughable/scary. The article even ominously suggests that “Perhaps the Indians intentionally held the fact a secret.” There are number of articles in 1920s about the mystery of this sugar and there is little-to-no attempt to actually talk to the native inhabitants of the land about it!)
Legendary UBC researcher, “Botany John”, John Davidson digs into the mystery and discovers that it is not caused by insect byproducts (e.g. aphids) as he originally thought. It is caused by healthy trees in wet and sunny locations producing an excess amount of photosynthesized sugar-water (The very thing maple trees store in excess amounts and we remove and call maple syrup). The water evaporates in the sun through the needles and leaves the sugar clumped around the needles.2
Davidson reports that the amount of produced sugar can be so much that trees can look completely white. Imagine! Finding a heavily snow-covered tree only to discover that it’s not snow, it’s sugar!
The taste of Douglas Fir Sugar becomes renown – “Placed in the mouth the sugar is exceedingly sweet, giving a flavor comparable to the highest class of the manufactured article.”3 It even briefly earns the tree a new nickname as the Sugar-Plum Tree “which, under certain conditions, hangs its own branches with sugar plums, sometimes in single drops of snowy sweetness, sometimes in clusters or masses of several drops that run together”4
Its chemical composition is broken down in the American Chemical Society Journal to another exciting discovery of it containing a large percentage extremely rare variety of sugar; Melezitose.5 It’s priced at $60 to $70 dollars per pound in the 1920s6, which is equivalent to about a thousand dollars a pound now. A thousand dollars a pound!
There is a big push to “ascertain its commercial possibilities”, some writers are very excited but others urge caution, noting that it can’t be relied on for an annual crop.7 The Sugar production depends a lot on sun and it is quickly washed away in any rainfall. Founding father of West Coast ethnobotany, James Teit, warns the Sugar was not used as a necessary part of indigenous food supplies, but was an extra treat.8
At this point you may be thinking ‘Wait, I know my Douglas Fir trees and I’ve never heard of this sugar?!’. I thought the exact same thing! I’ve flipped through all of my tree books and there is no mention at all.
After the mid-1920s there are no more articles or mention of Douglas Fir Sugar. It’s like the Sugar completely disappeared from the trees.
Not till in the 1970s do we see it mentioned again in the scholarly literature and it’s only by – a hero of mine – ethnobotanist Nancy Turner. Turner begins collecting the plant wisdom of indigenous elders and digging through ancient books and letters to fill any gaps. She starts publishing this information and also ends up acting as generation bridge for younger generations to share this knowledge.
Turner reveals some fascinating information about Douglas Fir Sugar. It was primarily gathered in the British Columbia interior and used as confection and sweetener. Although rare, it could be found in abundance and was widely traded along the Fraser Valley. The Nlaka’pamux name for it translates as “tree-(breast)-milk.”9
Turner also documents that Douglas Fir Sugar has now vanished from British Columbia:
Today, logging, or perhaps changing climate, has apparently eliminated many potential Douglas-fir “sugar trees.” Elders recalling the sugar from earlier times said no one has seen it recently. For example, Secwepemc elder Isaac Willard recalled seeing the sugar, shining white on the limb of a fir tree, and said that one had to get up early, before the sun, to get it. He described how one just breaks off the limb carefully and sucks the sugar off. “It is foamy and tastes like icing sugar. You do not see it any more since lumbering has come in” (Palmer 1975:52–53; emphasis added).10
Isn’t this terrible yet fascinating? It seems in the 1920s Douglas Fir Sugar was only just found by settlers before they started radically changing the land which resulted in it disappearing entirely.
Douglas Fir Sugar is another victim of Anthropocene. Another mystery that will go unsolved. Davidson’s explanation of it being caused by evaporated sugar-water, never did answer the key question of why only Douglas Fir Trees do this and not other trees. How were Douglas Firs able to produce/lose that much sugar so that they were completely white? What an incredible phenomenon that we will now never get the chance to experience or understand. Perhaps it was something only old-growth Douglas Firs could do?
I only learned about Douglas Fir Sugar by chance by reading Davidson’s 1927 book, Conifers, Junipers and Yew: Gymnosperms of British Columbia. At the start of the book there is the photo of the Sugar on a Douglas Fir branch that I shared above which is now in the Vancouver Archives. They appear to have a few photos of the same branch. All the 1920s articles on the topic share the same branch photos. I can’t find any other images!
The only other reference I can find to Douglas Fir Sugar, beyond Davidson’s and Turner’s work, is this early internet blog post (circa 2003) from ‘Paghat the Rat Girl’. Who has a Douglas Fir that “… produces this frosty sugar each summer. I once took a half-teaspoon & dashed in into my mouth & can’t say I found the flavor praiseworthy, but a people without cane or maple sugar handy for comparison would surely love it.”11
Paghat’s blog is a stunning wealth of information and a testament to how niche and helpful the early internet was. Paghat’s real name is Jessica Amanda Salmonson, a 75 year old award winning fantasy author and poet who lives in and maintains a woodland garden.
So perhaps there is still some hope that we may see or even try Douglas Fir Sugar in the future!
Update January 22, 2025:
Immediately after publishing I got my hands on Turner’s 1990 Thompson Ethnobotany – Knowledge and usage of plants by the Thompson Indians of British Columbia12 which includes a lot more information on Douglas Fir Sugar. Rather than rewriting I have summarized some of the insights below:
The sugar “is produced rarely, only by certain trees individual trees under certain conditions.” It was believed to accumulate on trees that are ‘wormy’ and have ‘oily’ branches after a month of very hot, dry weather.
Near Merritt, indigenous children used to harvest it from a place called ‘Sugar Mountain’. An interviewee claims in 1930 that it is now scarce since the area was logged.
Teit’s unpublished notes (1896-1918) on “Tree Sugar” are quoted:
D. J. Mcdonald says Tree sugar occasionally on pines as well as fir [.] always on fir & yellow pine of good growth very healthy & full of sap… Never on a sickly tree. A kind of tree lice go on trees of best kind and bite pore at the base of needles. This lets sap out. If no lice, no sugar or hardly any. Requires hot days & hot nights & long dry spell. June & July is when sap up best. Possibly some end of May [.] Sap runs and evaporates leaving sugar.
This contradicts what Davidson found, that the sugar was not caused by insects but by tree itself. I wonder who is right here! Unfortunately, Davidson’s 1919 study is the only scientific field-work we have on the topic. Lots of room for error in one study!
Interestingly, Turner also quotes Nlaka’pamuxs (The Thompson) blaming bees and ants eating the sugar for its disappearance not the logging. I know Honey Bees were introduced to BC in the late 1880s and quickly spread across the province, changing forests (see a future blog post about this). Could invasive species consuming the sugar or maybe invasive species killing the tree lice that created the sugar have caused the disappearance? The mystery deepens!
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References
- Dickie, Francis. “Discovery of Sugar on Douglas Fir.” American Forestry, vol. 26, Feb. 1920.https://archive.org/details/discovery-of-sugar-on-douglas-fir-american-forestry ↩︎
- Davidson, James. “Douglas Fir Sugar.” The Canadian Field-Naturalist, vol. 33, no. 1, Apr. 1919, pp. 6–9. https://doi.org/10.5962/p.337864 ↩︎
- “Sugar from the Douglas Fir” Scientific American, Vol. 122, No. 7 (February 14, 1920), pp. 165, 174-175. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/24993232 ↩︎
- “The Sugar Plum Tree” The Youth’s Companion (1827-1929); Apr 1, 1920; 94, 14; American Periodicals pg. 198 ↩︎
- Hudson, C. S., and S. F. Sherwood. “THE OCCURRENCE OF MELEZITOSE IN A MANNA FROM THE DOUGLAS FIR.” Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 40, no. 9, Sept. 1918, pp. 1456–60. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1021/ja02242a015 ↩︎
- Davidson, John, and Ivy Abercrombie. Conifers, Junipers and Yew: Gymnosperms of British Columbia. vol. 1;1.;, T.F. Unwin ltd. (E. Benn ltd.), London, 1927. ↩︎
- Davidson, James. “Douglas Fir Sugar.” ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Kuhnlein, Harriet V., and Nancy J. Turner. Traditional Plant Foods of Canadian Indigenous Peoples: Nutrition, Botany and Use. 1st ed., Routledge, 2020. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003054689. ↩︎
- Turner, Nancy J. “‘That Was Our Candy!’: Sweet Foods in Indigenous Peoples’ Traditional Diets in Northwestern North America.” Journal of Ethnobiology, vol. 40, no. 3, Sept. 2020, pp. 305–27. https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-40.3.305. ↩︎
- Paghat the Rat Girl. “Coastal Douglas-fir – Part II: Its Exploitation” Paghat’s Garden. 2003. https://www.paghat.com/douglasfir2.html ↩︎
- Turner, Nancy J., et al. Thompson Ethnobotany: Knowledge and Usage of Plants by the Thompson Indians of British Columbia. vol. no. 3.;no. 3;, Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria, 1990. pg 108-109 ↩︎