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David Douglas, a Scottish botanist, tramped the Canadian north-west at the
beginning of the 19th century, cataloguing the region’s vegetation and noting
the native ways. The Douglas fir was one of his. He died aged 34 in Hawaii,
apparently trampled to death by a raging bull after he fell into a hunters’ pit.
Unless, as Ann Lindsay Mitchell and Syd House’s admirably lucid biography
speculates, it was murder. David Douglas is published by Aurum,
£19.99/$29.95, ISBN 1854105914.