It belongs to the Pinaceae Family, with the
Latin name of Abies ziyuanensis.
The evergreen arbor can grow up to 20 to 25
meters high, with a chest diameter of 40 to 90 centimeters. It has a gray bark
that cracks into flaky pieces. The leaves come out on twigs and stretch both
outward and upward, or into two irregular queues. Those below the twigs look
like combs, about 2 to 4.8 centimeters long and 3 to 3.5 millimeters wide. Its
oval cone shapes like a cylinder of 10 to 11 centimeters long, with a diameter
of 4.2 to 4.5 centimeters wide. The cone turns dark green and brown when grown
up. The oval seed is 1 centimeter long and in light brown. The color of the seed
wing, in the shape of a triangle standing upside down, is light mauve
black.
Ziyuan Fir is native to the tropic
mountainous region of Central Asia, where it's cool in summer and cold in
winter, with abundant precipitation. It has a long snow period and ice period
there, and it's cloudy and foggy all the year round, with little sunlight. The
pH value of the acidic yellow brown earth there is 4.5 to 5. It is mainly
sparsely distributed in mixed forests of conifers and broadleaf trees, standing
tall and erect with crowns higher than that of the broadleaf trees. Young trees
are shade-resistant, but the grown-up ones need proper sunlight. The florescence
lasts from April to May, and the cones ripen in October. There is a plastochrone
in fructification.
It is found only in Ziyuan County, northeast
part of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and two counties in the southwest of
Hunan Province. Not only the quantity of Ziyuan Fir is small but also most of
them are over-matured, so they're in need of timely
protection.