The genus name is derived from cupréssus, the Latin name for the common cypress, derived from the Greek κῠπάρισσος cypárissos, itself of non-Indo-European origin: perhaps from the Akkadian kapárru-ísu (balance-tree), or from the Hebrew gopher, the name of the tree whose wood was used to build Noah’s Ark. The species name is the result of the combination of semper = always and from virens = verdant.
| Common name | Cypress |
| Origin | A tree native to Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean: Iran, Syria and Cyprus and now widespread throughout its basin. It prefers warm climate areas with dry summers, grows in arid soils and is widespread as an ornamental plant and recognised as a landscape icon. |
| Description | A large, particularly beautiful, evergreen tree that can grow to more than 20 metres in older specimens. The trunk is erect, with columnar habit, greyish, fibrous and longitudinally striated bark. Produces numerous branches forming a slender, conical-pyramidal crown. Leaves are persistent, small, dimorphic, squamiform, rhomboid, dark green, bearing a cinder-like gland on the back, in opposite pairs, imbricate on thin, dense ramules. Staminiferous flowers are numerous, in small, yellowish catkins, the female ones forming a rounded, brown, dehiscent, woody false fruit (galbulo) composed of pentagonal, scudiform scales. When the strobili open, winged seeds (achenes) emerge from the slits. The bark is grey-brown, with long longitudinal fissures. Its wood is aromatic, but not resinous, hard and fine-textured, yellowish in colour and much used for furniture construction. Particularly resistant to fungi and pests, it was also used in shipbuilding in the past. Legend has it that Noah’s ark was built from cypress wood, as was part of Solomon’s Temple. It is a very long-lived plant and boasts one of the oldest specimens in the world, in Iran, where one tree is reported to be around 4,000 years old. To the Greeks, the cypress was born “out of the gods’ pity for human grief” and therefore a symbol of mourning, as it was to the Etruscans and Romans, who associated it with the cult of the dead. The funeral symbolism, handed down from Mediterranean cultures with origins as a pagan cult, has been transferred to the Christian tradition by presiding over sacred and burial places. The cypress produces essential oils that are used in perfumery and the natural flavouring industry. In the past it had a widespread therapeutic and cosmetic use. The historian Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) relates that Assyrian women rubbed a mixture of cypress, cedar and myrrh on their faces to obtain ‘beautiful and deliciously perfumed’ skin. |
