I don't see any photos of young seed cones for this tree, so here are a couple from a young tree on the UBC campus.
Surprisingly, the first pics in this gallery of the typical species as opposed to cultivars. Anyone got some nice old-growth pics to add?
These are middle-growth, and urban trees at that. The thing is, I thought this was going to be easy, just go take a distance photo and be done with it, but now I have questions about these. Our new Vancouver Trees app has a marker at 44th and Wales that says "Pseudotsuga menziesii, City of Vancouver Heritage Tree". The thing is, there are two trees on the south side, and across the street is another tree. I don't know which is the heritage tree. They don't look the same to me, but they all have the right cones. The branches are out of reach to examine the amount of wax on the leaves. None of the cones seem to have recurved bract scales. Sorry not good details; I wasn't expecting to need the camera with the zoom. Here are the two trees, north side on the left, then south side on the left. The south side trees seem to have shorter needles and shorter branches. The north side has branches that look longer and more droopy. The app mentions another tree a block away at 43rd and Wales. This has a very blue/grey appearance from the east side and up close, but from a distance from the west side, that doesn't seem to be the case. The needles on this are longer than on the others - 3cm, and they appear to be growing around the branch. I didn't see new cones, just very old ones on the ground, which I didn't photograph. Is there enough here to tell if these are all just the species, or are any of them a variety?
The last one is Pseudotsuga menziesii subsp. glauca (Rocky Mts Douglas-fir), as opposed to the local native Pseudotsuga menziesii subsp. menziesii (Coast Douglas-fir) [taxonomic comment: although usually listed as just a variety, it shows very strong genetic, morphological and ecological differences, and is better treated as a subspecies, or arguably even a distinct species].
I don't know for sure if these are old growth; they're older than what I've posted so far. This tree (I think both tree photos show the same tree) is in Stanley Park, just past the Rose Garden. It looks as old as any other Douglas Fir I saw in the park. Here is a tree at UBC Botanical Garden, in the north garden. It seems to be the same size as the old original trees in the Asian Garden, but the sight lines were not so good over there.
They don't look it; they're no bigger than lots of cultivated specimens in Britain. Should be possible to get pics of old trees in Cathedral Grove, like this one on Flickr.
