Cupressus sempervirens Seeds | Mediterranean Cypress
LATIN NAME: Cupressus sempervirens
COMMON NAME: Mediterranean Cypress, Italian Cypress, Pencil Pine
Plant Profile
The cones are globose and grey-green at first, then woody brown, built of thick peltate scales that fit together like the plates of a small dome. Male cones are tiny and yellow, borne at the shoot tips, and the tree is wind-pollinated, which is why cypress pollen is one of the great seasonal allergens of the Mediterranean spring. Seed is flattened and narrowly winged, and the cone takes two growing seasons to ripen.
Because the tree has been planted for four thousand years, the natural range is hard to read. The most convincing wild stands sit on limestone and serpentine slopes of Crete, the Aegean islands and southern Anatolia, often as scattered trees among maquis and pine, on thin dry soils where little else will hold.
Cypress pollen carries a major allergen designated Cup s 1, and the enormous ornamental plantings of the Mediterranean have turned a wild tree into a public-health subject. The pollen is light, produced in quantity and released over a short, intense window, which is why cities plant male-sterile or fruiting clones when they renew a cypress avenue.
Cypress timber is durable and closely grained, and it was worked in the ancient Mediterranean for doors, beams, chests and coffins, including door leaves that were valued precisely because they resisted rot. Today the tree’s main work is visual: an avenue tree, a windbreak, a cemetery and cloister planting, a foil behind stone, and a classic subject for Mediterranean-style bonsai.
For a windbreak, space the trees about two metres apart in a single row and clip the tops to keep the barrier dense. As a bonsai subject the fastigiate form is difficult to manage because the branch structure is so upright; the spreading form is the better raw material.
Science & Biotechnology
Distil the foliage and you get an oil dominated by monoterpenes and by two distinctive groups: the cembrenes, macrocyclic diterpene hydrocarbons that are a chemical signature of the species, and the sesquiterpene alcohol cedrol, with its woody, pencil-shaving note. The biflavone cupressuflavone is another marker compound of the genus.
Conifer leaf oil is usually taken by steam distillation of fresh or partly dried needles and shoot tips, because the yield falls quickly once the foliage is dead and dry. The oil comes over as a pale, mobile liquid that darkens on standing; the heavier diterpene fraction tends to stay in the still, so a cypress oil is richer in the light monoterpenes than the raw leaf chemistry would suggest.
Uses & Benefits
Walk into almost any Mediterranean burial ground and you will find the same dark green pencil standing at the wall, and the shape is not an accident of garden fashion: a fastigiate cypress casts a narrow shadow, takes up almost no ground, and reads as a flame from any direction, which is exactly what a culture adds to a grave. The same tree provided the timber that ancient joiners cut into door leaves and coffins.
Growing from Seed
The species carries two clearly different architectures. The columnar form holds its branches tight against the trunk, giving a tall, almost closed spire; the spreading form, closer to the genuinely wild tree of the eastern Mediterranean hills, opens into a broad and irregular grey-green crown on a shorter trunk. A batch raised from open-pollinated cones routinely gives a mixture, which is why serious plantings are cloned rather than sown.
Use a free-draining mix of two parts coarse grit or sand, one part sieved loam and one part leaf mould, and sow the winged seed shallowly, just covered. A cold, moist period helps even the emergence of a batch, so a seedbed left out through winter in a mild climate gives a more uniform stand than a warm windowsill. Transplant the seedlings once they have made their first true foliage sprays.
Thin seedlings to about twenty centimetres apart while they are small and lift them with a root ball, because cypress resents a bare-root move. If you want to be sure of a columnar shape, take semi-ripe cuttings from a known parent rather than relying on seed, and keep them in a humid frame out of direct sun.
The serious disease is cypress canker, caused by Seiridium species, which girdles branches and then trunks and spread across the Mediterranean through the twentieth century. Watch for sunken, resin-beaded lesions on a branch and remove the affected limb well below the damage, sterilising the tool afterwards. Spider mites yellow the foliage in hot dry weather, and waterlogged ground at the collar will kill a cypress faster than either.
Our Take
One column of cypress will do more for the proportions of a small garden than a whole bed of shrubs, and it will still be standing when the fence has gone. Grow it with other conifers that tolerate dry ground — the coastal Monterey cypress, the fine-textured Lawson cypress, or the famously fast Leyland cypress for a hedge that must close quickly.
Related Reading
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