Chamaecyparis lawsoniana — Lawson's Cypress

Introduced from the west coast of America in the mid-19th century, and now an extremely common tree, both as the type and as one of its numerous cultivars.

The type tree is quite dense when young, but more gaunt and with longer drooping foliage when older, but the leader always droops and the foliage is also always drooping to some degree. The leaves have slightly spreading and pointed side leaves, and smell strongly of parsley when crushed. Small spherical cones are produced which ripen brown.

The numerous cultivars (some of which never reach tree size) differ from the type in colour, shoot angle or foliage form or by having juvenile rather than adult foliage.

Yellow-leaved forms include:
  ‘Lutea’ with drooping sprays
  ‘Winston Churchill’ with sprays at a variety of angles
  ‘Lane’ with level sprays
  ‘Stewartii’ with long arching sprays.

Blue-leaved forms include:
  ‘Pembury Blue’ with short, dense sprays
  ‘Triomf van Boskoop’ (delightful name!) with large, lax sprays

Forms with erect foliage include:
  ‘Erecta Viridis’ with steeply rising sprays
  ‘Alumii’ with bluish foliage
  ‘Columnaris’, a narrow column with sprays at all angles
  ‘Kilmacurragh’, a narrow spire (uncommon)

Forms with aberrant foliage include:
  ‘Intertexta’ with large, sparse sprays
  ‘Wisselii’ with very strange clumped foliage

Forms with juvenile foliage include the rather similar ‘Fletcherii’ and ‘Ellwoodii’, the latter also having colour variants.

For similar trees see: Scale-like leaves

 
 

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Copyright © 2007 Philip Brassett