Fokienia hodginsii

Fokienia hodginsii is the only living species in the genus, a conifer that looks assembled from parts of several others. The flattened, fanning sprays read as arborvitae from across a lawn. Up close, the scale leaves show chalky white bands on their undersides and the small round cones sit closer to Chamaecyparis and Calocedrus. Botanists have argued about where the tree belongs for more than a century and have not finished. Plants of the World Online still accepts the name Fokienia hodginsii, while several recent phylogenetic studies nest the genus inside Chamaecyparis and would have the tree called Chamaecyparis hodginsii. We keep the older name because that is what the plant is known and traded by, and both are defensible depending on whose treatment you follow.

The name records two accidents of history. Fokien is the old transliteration of Fujian, the Chinese province where the species was first collected, and the epithet honors Hodgins, who sent the original material west. In Vietnam the tree is pơmu, and that name carries far more weight locally than the Latin one. Pơmu wood is aromatic, dense, and famously slow to rot, and the trade in that wood has been both the making and the near unmaking of the species.

Everything about this tree comes back to the scent of the wood. Distilled from foliage and heartwood, pemou oil is sold in the West as Siam wood and is unusual in being almost entirely sesquiterpenes, chiefly nerolidol and fokienol. Published work on the leaf oil has found real activity against Gram-positive bacteria. In southern China and Vietnam the timber has gone into doors, window frames, carved panels, and furniture, and often enough into coffins that English picked up the name coffinwood. The H'Mong of the northern Vietnamese mountains split pơmu for roof planks and wall partitions. All that value has come at a cost. Illegal logging continues to thin the mature trees across most of the range despite legal protection, and the IUCN lists the species as Near Threatened.

Here in Aiken, South Carolina, the tree has grown very well for a number of years, which is more than most conifers of this provenance manage in the humid Southeast. Give reasonably moist but well-drained ground, acid rather than sweet, and either full sun for a dense columnar habit or partial shade for something looser and more open. Full shade will not do. Expect forty to sixty feet in time and twenty-five to thirty-five feet across, with a narrow pyramidal crown filling in unhurriedly. Hardiness runs to zone 8, and gardeners north of that line should not count on the tree outdoors.

The stock behind these plants was struck from cuttings taken on the Armstrong Campus in Savannah, Georgia, in August of 2026. That same campus has supplied several of the tender woody plants we grow.