Cypress Tree
(Cupressus sempervirens)

THE associations of some trees are ineffaceable. Though neither in form nor in color has the Cypress any suggestion of grief or gloom to the dweller in northern Europe who may be ignorant of its name and history, the customs and language of ages have, in its own southern climes, indelibly impressed upon it the symbolism of bodily death and spiritual immortality.

The Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) is generally a flame - shaped, tapering, cone-like tree, with but a short stem below its branches, which rise erectly and close to the trunk, much as in the Lombardy Poplar. Even in its native country it seldom exceeds fifty or sixty feet in height; and in our climate its average rate of growth is from a foot to eighteen inches per annum for the first eight or ten years, and after that it lengthens more slowly, so that trees forty years of age are seldom as many feet in height. After reaching a height between thirty and forty feet its growth is often almost imperceptible. 

The dimensions of the species in southern Europe vastly surpass our largest examples. Thus one at Monza, in Italy, known to be 150 years old, is recorded as ninety feet high, two and a half feet in diameter of the stem, and twenty feet in that of the tree. By far the largest and oldest Cypress in Europe, perhaps the oldest living tree of any kind, is the historical and gigantic tree at Soma, in Lombardy. It is popularly supposed to have been planted in the year of the birth of Christ, and is looked upon with great reverence in consequence; but there is said to be documentary evidence that it was a tree more than forty years earlier. It is more than 120 feet in height, and its stem is twenty-three feet round. In addition to the interest arising from this great age and size, the tree has the distinction of having been wounded by Francis I., who is said to have struck his sword into it in despair after his defeat at Pavia; and of having been so respected by Napoleon that in planning his road over the Simplon he deflected it from the straight line to avoid injuring the tree.

The branches of the Cypress divide repeatedly, and approximately in a single plane, so as to form flat, frond-like sprays, the smaller twigs of which are quadrangular in section and are closely covered with small overlapping leaves in four rows; these are of a yellowish shade of green, with a smooth and shining curved surface, and remain on the tree for five or six years, spreading out-wards and becoming more sharply pointed as they get older. On the main stem the leaves are longer and needle-like.

As in most members of that main division of the Coniferae that is known as the Araucariaceae, the male and female flowers of the Cypress are produced on the same tree. The staminate flowers are very numerous, and are only about a quarter of an inch long. Each of them consists of an elongated cone or axis, bearing the male "sporophylls" or staminate leaves, minute scales of a yellowish color, each bearing three pollen-sacs. The female flowers are fewer in number, each being a globose, or rather polyhedral, cone made up of about a dozen polygonal scales with a conical projection in the center of each and a number of erect ovules at the base of its inner surface. When mature, this cone or "galbulus" is from an inch to an inch and a half in diameter, and its scales become corky externally and woody within, and separate to allow the seeds to drop out.

The wood of the Cypress is hard, remarkably fine and close in grain, very durable, of a beautiful reddish-brown color, and resinously fragrant. The evergreen character of the tree, and perhaps its flame-like monumental outline, the durability of its timber, and its wholesomely balsamic odor, have no doubt jointly contributed to that symbolism which Spenser summed up by speaking of it as "the Cypresse funerall." As Horace says, whatever was thought worthy to be handed down to the most remote posterity was by the ancients enclosed either in Cypress or in Cedar wood. The Gopher-wood of which the Ark was constructed is supposed by some to have been Cypress, and Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians used Cypress-wood for their mummy-cases; whilst Thucydides mentions that it was specially reserved to contain the ashes of those Greeks who died for their country, and Plato directed that his code of laws should be engraved on Cypress-wood, as being more durable than brass. Theophrastus states that the tree grew wild in the island of Crete on snow-covered mountains, and in Cyprus; and that it would not grow in too warm a situation. He recommends those who wish to grow it successfully to obtain some of its native soil from Cyprus; and says further that it was dedicated to Pluto because, when cut down, it, like other Conifers, never throws up suckers. 

This may perhaps be connected with the custom of burying branches of Cypress with the dead, though more probably this, like the modern Turkish practice of planting the tree at either end of their graves, arose from the belief that the aroma of its resin would neutralise the effluvia of the cemetery. So wholesome was this aroma considered, that Oriental physicians were in the habit of sending patients with weak lungs to the isle of Crete. The bridge built by Semiramis over the Euphrates is said to have been of Cypress-wood. Pliny narrates several remarkable, but not incredible, instances of the durability of Cypress-wood. He says that there were in his time Cypresses still standing at Rome which were more ancient than the city itself; but that the tree was not a native of Italy, having been originally introduced from Greece to the Greek colony of Tarentum; whence, indeed, Cato, in his work on "Rural Economy," recommends that its seed should be procured. The doors of the temple of Diana, at Ephesus, were, Pliny relates, of Cypress-wood, and appeared quite new when four centuries old; as did also the statue of Jupiter in the Capitol, which was of the same material and half as old again. The tree in his time was employed for rafters, joists, and especially for vine-props, so that a Cypress grove was thought a valuable dowry for a daughter. 

The Cypress was also one of the trees tortured into various shapes with the shears in that "topiary" work which was as fashionable in the Roman villa of the first century as in the English, French, or Dutch garden of the seventeenth. The wood of the Cypress may have been one of several kinds of timber marked with ornamental knots and wavy figures in the grain which, under the name of Citron-wood, were most highly prized by the Romans for the manufacture of tables known as "mensae tigrinae et pantherinae." From mediaeval times the coffins of the Popes have been made of Cypress-wood, at least in part; and it is related that the doors of St. Peter's, made of this wood, lasted without decay from the time of Constantine to that of Pope Eugenius IV. in the fifteenth century. Evelyn mentions many uses to which the wood was put:-

"What," he says, "the uses of this timber are for chests and other utensils, harps, and divers other musical instruments (it being a sonorous wood, and therefore employed for organ-pipes, as heretofore for supporters of vines, poles, and planks, resisting the worm, moth, and all putrefaction, to eternity), the Venetians sufficiently understood, who did every twentieth year, and oftener (the Romans every thirteenth), make a considerable revenue of it out of Candy. . . . There was in Candy a vast wood of these trees, belonging to the republic, by malice or accident, or, perhaps, by solar heat (as were many woods, seventy-four years after, here in England), set on fire; which, beginning 1400, continued burning seven years before it could be extinguished; being fed by the unctuous nature of the timber, of which there were to be seen at Venice planks above four feet broad."

There can be little doubt that the Cypress was originally a native of Asia Minor, and probably also of the island of Cyprus, from which it almost certainly derives its name. It may perhaps be doubted how far the legends versified by Ovid in his "Metamorphoses" are due to original mythologising by the poet on his own account, and how far they represent popular belief; but the story of the origin of the Cypress, according to Ovid, is somewhat as follows:- A beautiful deer, a pet of Apollo's, used to come every day to be fed either by the god or by his faithful attendant, a youth named Cyparissus; but one day, as it came bounding from the forest towards Cyparissus, he, by mischance, killed it with a javelin which he was hurling in sport. So great was the boy's grief at the accident that Apollo could not console him. He flung himself on the ground in despair, as the conclusion of the story has been translated,

"Praying in expiation of his crime
Thenceforth to mourn to all succeeding time.
And now, of blood exhausted, he appears
Drain'd by a torrent of continual tears.
The fleshy colour in his body fades,
A greenish tincture all his limbs invades.
From his fair head, where curling ringlets hung,
A tapering bush, with spiry branches, sprung,
Which, stiffening by degrees, its stem extends,
Till to the starry skies the spire ascends.
Apollo saw, and sadly sighing, cried,
'Be, then, for ever what thy prayer implied:
Bemoan'd by me, in others grief excite,
And still preside at every funeral rite.'"

The last line refers to a Cypress-tree being placed at the door of a Roman house where a dead body was lying.

Though every cemetery in the East is thickly planted with Cypresses, the tree has none of that almost necessary mental suggestion of sadness which pertains to the mode of growth of the Weeping Willow or the somber hue of the Yew. It is, in fact, a very pleasant and ornamental evergreen, with the somewhat formal but unusual outline that renders it suitable for planting singly or in rows, especially where space is limited. It cannot withstand the severe winters of northern France or Germany; but with us it ripens its seed freely, and, as has been seen, grows almost as rapidly, if not to so large a size, as in its native land.