Abies × insignis Carr. ex Bailly

Raised c. 1850 in the Renault nursery, Bulguéville, France, an open-polinated plant of A. pinsapo being the seed parent. Initially this hybrid fir was thought to be the result of graft hybridisation, for the seed parent was a scion of A. pinsapo that had been grafted on A. alba, and it was presumed – roughly translated into general terms – that some sort of genetic exchange had taken place. Of course this was not the case; rather a nearby plant of A. nordmanniana pollinated the grafted A. pinsapo, but the unhelpful myth was still being perpetuated in lierature well into the early twentieth century (Elwes & Henry 1906–1913; Krüssmann 1985).

The cross was made again, though with the seed and pollen parents reversed, at Aulnay, Sceaux, France, in 1871 or 1872, and named A. insignis var. speciosa (Bailly) Rehder. Several cultivars were described in the early 1900s but it is not clear how, it at all, they differ from the typical form. Only ‘Pendula’, described later, seems convincingly distinct (Liu 1971).

A. × insignis is one of the rarer hybrid firs. The only plant recorded from the UK and Ireland by The Tree Register is one at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, Hampshire, which was planted in 1989 and by 2018 measured 8.7 m × 0.53 m dbh (Tree Register 2020). Edwards & Marshall (2019) describe it as ‘A vigorous, large, conical tree, the foliage appearing blue-green from a distance’.