Abies × vilmorinii Mast.

Raised by Vilmorin at Verrières, France, in 1867, who used A. cephalonica as the pollen parent and A. pinsapo as the seed parent, obtaining a single fertile seed which germinated the next year. True seedlings were raised from the original tree in 1888 (Liu 1971). In the original German, Krüssmann suggests this cross can occur wherever the parents are grown together, but the English translation somewhat misleadingly says it ‘also occurs naturally among the parents’ (Krüssmann 1985), which could give the false impression that they occur together in the wild; they do not. Speaking of Vilmorin’s original tree, Elwes reported that the bracts of the seed cone are ‘in some years exserted, in other years shorter and concealed’ (Elwes & Henry 1906–1913).

There are several examples scattered through European arboreta, including a tree of 15 m (in 2015) at Bedgebury, Kent, and one of 26.5 m × 0.5 m dbh (in 2014, from a 1923 planting) at Westonbirt, Gloucestershire (Tree Register 2020). Jacobson calls it ‘extremely rare’ but notes that it has been in North American cultivation since at least 1913 and that it occasionally appears in the nursery trade there (Jacobson 1996).