film screening
Thursday, November 15th
7:00 p.m.
Oregon Historical Society
More from our friends at the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission:
“The Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and Forestry Commission Scotland has completed the documentary film Finding David Douglas (FDD). More than four years in the making, it is the first film ever produced on David Douglas (1799-1834), the remarkable botanist / plant hunter from Scotland who explored western North America in the 1820s and 1830s — a time before white settlement altered the landscape. Today, we widely remember Douglas through the tree named in his honor — the Douglas fir.
FDD focuses on David Douglas’s contributions to science — forestry, botany, and horticulture — and his relationships with Indians and Hudson’s Bay Company employees he met during his travels. Douglas introduced more than 200 new species to the gardens and forests of Europe. Words from his journals and letters form the structure of the narrative script. Douglas’s enthusiasm, sense of adventure, curiosity and determination shine through Finding David Douglas.
This film portrait of Douglas — an environmentalist before his time — encourages today’s audience to appreciate fully the natural world and how one person’s efforts can make a difference. The production team collaborated with Parks Canada, the World Forestry Center, and an international advisory coalition of scholars and scientists from across North America, the United Kingdom, Hawaii and France.
The documentary was filmed in locations that David Douglas actually appeared — in Scotland, England, throughout the Pacific Northwest, into northern Canada and remote York Factory on Hudson Bay, and in California and Hawaii. Rare botanical illustrations and period images (paintings, drawings, photographs and maps) join on-camera interviews in creating the visual magic of Finding David Douglas.”
