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Incense cedar leaves and acorn drawing9/11/2023 Since then I’ve seen these trees quite often, because they are a popular ornamental (there are a half dozen in a nearby neighborhood park), but until my November trip (details of which are recounted in the post titled ‘ Pivoting‘) I hadn’t managed to find another wild one. As soon as I started paging through ‘Trees and Shrubs of the Pacific Northwest’ (Turner/Kuhlmann 2014) I realized it had to be incense-cedar ( Calocedrus decurrens), because the leaves were much longer than those of Western red-cedar, Port Orford-cedar, or Alaska-cedar. I had no idea what it was, but the leaves looked completely different than those of the western red-cedar, with which I was familiar. The first time I noticed one of these trees was several years ago while looking for moss and lichens along the McKenzie River. The reason that early settlers started calling our trees cedars is because they felt like they smelled like the true cedars of Eurasia.įor anyone curious about my absence, or the changes in the form of these profiles, please see my recent blog ‘Equinoctial evaluations’. ![]() Our native ‘cedars’ are in the cypress family, Cupressaceae, along with the redwoods, junipers, and cypress. True cedars are in the genus Cedrus in the family Pinaceae, and are all native to southern Eurasia. The first thing I have to mention about these trees we call cedars is that they are not true cedars (which is why these common names are hyphenated), and in fact are not even in the same family as true cedars. I am finally ready to start profiling the so called cedars of our region. ![]() Calocedrus decurrens (Incense-cedar) with the leaves outlined by soot
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