Identifying Conifers: Scaly Conifers

This will be my last post about how to identify conifers.  Today I will be talking about conifers with scales: that is, conifers that don't look needly.

First, I would like to talk about Chamaecyparis.  Chamaecyparis (pronounced cami-sip-a-rus) is sometimes called "false cypress," because there are way too many different kinds of trees with the name "cypress" that aren't really related to each other.

This is a chamaecyparis bush.

Here's a close-up of one of its twigs.

See those green scales?  Each individual scale is a leaf.  Just like on most needly conifers, each needle is a leaf.

Here's another type of chamaecyparis.  Its scales grow much tighter against its twigs.

 Chamaecyparis trees have the most awesome little cones.  They look like soccer balls!  If you see these, you know you're looking at a chamaecyparis.

Let's move on to our next conifer.  Have you ever seen berries that look like this?

These are the types of berries you see on a juniper.  They are actually not berries:  they are modified cones!  If you look at them closely, you can see the bumps that used to be individual cone scales, long ago in evolutionary history.

See the little white bumps on these developing juniper cones?  Those bumps mark what used to be separate scales.

You may notice that in the picture above, the juniper has very needle-like scales.  Some junipers have more needle like scales, and some have very short scales.  In the picture below, you can see how tight the scales are to the twig:

You have to be careful though!  There is one type of chamaecyparis that has blue cone-berries like junipers.

Now let's talk about Giant Sequoias.  These are the biggest trees in the world.

Picture from wikipedia.

These huge trees are really amazing.  They live in California, but are different from their coastal counterparts, the California Redwoods. They have scaly leaves:

Picture from wikipedia

And they have cute lip-cones, just like their neighbors.

Picture also from wikipedia.  We don't have giant sequoias at the plantations.

Arborvitae trees are also very cool.  These trees are often used as shrubs.  Sometimes these trees are called cedars, but as you know from my last post, true cedars are something different entirely.  The tall, narrow tree on the right in this picture is an arborvitae.

Arbor-vitae have scales a lot like chamaecyparis.  However, their scales form very, very flat twigs.  Here's Phil the gardener holding an arborvitae twig on the right of the picture and a chamaecyparis on the left:

Here, I'm pinching the same twigs in my fingers.  Arborvitae is on the bottom.  You can see how the chamaecyparis twig is kind of flat, but the arborvitae is even more so.

If you're unsure whether the tree you're looking at is an arbor-vitae or a chamaecyparis, your surest bet is to look at the cones.  Chamaecyparis cones are very distinctive, as you can see above.  Arborvitae cones look like tiny upside-down tulips.  I don't have a good picture to show, unfortunately.

To close this post, we should talk a little bit about cedar wood.  When you hear someone say, "This is a cedar-lined closet!", that tells you very little about what kind of tree that wood came from.  Cedar wood can come from true cedars, which I talked about in the last post.  More commonly, however, cedar wood comes from a variety of trees that belong to the plant family Cupressaceae.  (I'm sure that helps you a lot, so let me explain.)  Cupressaceae contains trees such as junipers, arbor-vitae, and some types of cypress.  Redwood trees are also part of this plant family, but their wood is not considered "cedar wood."  (To make things more complicated, some types of cypress trees are not in the plant family Cupressaceae.  However, these cypress trees are not used to make cedar wood: only the ones in Cupressaceae are.)

You may be thinking, "Well surely you can at least group the trees that cedar wood comes from by separating "red cedar wood" trees from "white cedar wood" trees.  False.  White cedar wood can come from a Cupressaceae cypress with the genus name "Cupressus," or it can come from an arbor-vitae.  Red cedar wood can come from an arbor-vitae, a juniper, or a tree called Toona ciliata which is not in the plant family Cupressaceae, nor is it even a conifer.  It's a deciduous angiosperm, for crying out loud!!! Why do they call its wood cedar???

Anyway...  This is why we like to use scientific names.