Cunninghamia lanceolata 'Glauca'

This is the silvery blue-needled form of the China fir, and the color is the reason to choose it over the ordinary green. Needles are broad, flat, stiff, and sharply pointed, an inch or two long, arranged in spirals that read as flat sprays and holding a distinct glaucous blue that intensifies in good light. The frame is boldly pyramidal with tiered horizontal branching, reaching forty to sixty feet in cultivation here, considerably more in China. Old bark peels in long strips to reveal reddish brown beneath. Dead needles hang on inside the crown for a year or two, which some gardeners dislike and others regard as part of the character; either way, a China fir is never mistaken for anything else.

The genus honors James Cunningham, a Scottish surgeon working for the East India Company who collected in Fujian and Zhoushan around the turn of the eighteenth century and became the first Westerner to send this tree home, in 1702. Lanceolata describes the needle. In China the tree is shan mu, and calling it merely important would be an understatement: China fir is among the country's principal timber species, grown in vast plantations on rotations of twenty to thirty years. The wood is soft, light, strongly scented, remarkably resistant to rot, and untouched by termites, which made it the traditional choice for coffins and for temple construction, where the fragrance was valued as much as the durability. Boats, bridges, furniture, and lamp posts all took the same timber.

Alongside the timber tradition sits a smaller medicinal one. Decoctions of the cones were used for coughs, and ash from the burnt bark was applied to wounds and burns. The essential oil distilled from the branches has long gone into perfumery, and modern analysis has found it dominated by cedrol, which laboratory work has shown to be a potent antifungal, outperforming a standard reference compound in trials against a serious tree pathogen. The scent that made the wood desirable for a temple turns out to be doing real chemical work.

Give full sun to light shade, deep moist well-drained soil, and shelter from cold drying wind, which browns the foliage faster than low temperatures do. Growth is steady rather than rushed and the tree wants room; this is a specimen for a lawn, a park, a large garden, or an arboretum, not a foundation plant. One genuinely unusual trait for a conifer: China fir coppices, resprouting readily from a cut stump or from the base, so a storm-damaged or badly sited tree can be cut down and started again, and multi-stemmed specimens arise naturally. Worth knowing that 'Glauca' is a color form rather than a sharply defined clone, and blue-tinged individuals turn up in wild populations, so expect some variation in intensity between plants.

Photos courtesy of the American Conifer Society