Incense Cedar
Calocedrus decurrens · Cupressaceae
- Form
- Tree
- Height
- 60–150 ft
- Sun
- Full Sun
- Water
- Low
- Habitat
- Montane · Oak Woodland
🌿 California native
Quick facts
- Habitat: Montane mixed-conifer forest and upper oak woodland (Tahoe Basin, western Sierra)
- Form / size: Columnar conifer, 60–150 ft
- Sun: Full sun · Water: Low
- The smell test: crushed foliage smells strongly of shoe polish or pencil shavings
Description
A tall, columnar conifer whose scale-like leaves are pressed into flat, glossy fan-shaped sprays, green on both sides. The bark is cinnamon-red and deeply furrowed, peeling in long fibrous strips on old trunks. Two tells settle it. The small seed cones (under an inch and a half) open into an odd “duck-bill” or wine-glass shape of just a few scales, and the crushed foliage gives off a strong, spicy scent most people read as shoe polish or a freshly sharpened pencil. Incense cedar is a core component of Sierra mixed-conifer forest, and some trees pass 500 years old.
Indigenous & historical use
The Sierra Miwok of the Yosemite region built their cone-shaped bark houses (umucha) by leaning long slabs of incense-cedar bark against a frame of poles. They also cut the straight, close-grained, knot-free wood from the tree’s high branches to make prized sinew-backed hunting bows. Both uses are recorded by Samuel Barrett and Edward Gifford in Miwok Material Culture (1933).
Ecological role
Incense cedar shares the western-slope mixed-conifer forest with ponderosa and Jeffrey pine, sugar pine, white fir, Douglas-fir, and California black oak. More shade-tolerant than the pines it grows with, it can establish in partial shade and fill in after disturbance, and its thick basal bark helps mature trees survive the low-severity ground fires that once ran through these forests. Deer browse the foliage and dusky-footed woodrats take the seeds, though the pungent resin makes the seed unpalatable to most rodents. The largest old trees provide nest structure for California spotted owls and great gray owls.
Habitat & range
Mixed-conifer forest of the western Sierra Nevada, roughly 2,000 to 7,500 ft, extending down into upper oak woodland. It reaches Lake Tahoe on the east, where it grows around the lower basin, but it is essentially absent from the Jeffrey-pine and red-fir forests of the Mammoth country east of the crest.
In the garden
A drought-tolerant native conifer once established, wanting full sun and room for a large columnar form. It tolerates a range of soils, is hardy well below freezing, and asks only for deep, infrequent summer water. Low-maintenance as a screen or specimen tree.
Propagation
From seed collected in fall, improved by about 30 to 60 days of cold-moist stratification. On disturbed Sierra sites, spring-planted seedlings establish better than fall-planted ones. It is not usually grown from cuttings.
Where to see it near you
- iNaturalist — observed across California (map)
- Mixed-conifer forest around Lake Tahoe and throughout the western Sierra.
Sources
- Calscape · iNaturalist · Wikipedia
- Indigenous use: Barrett, S.A. & E.W. Gifford, Miwok Material Culture (1933), “Dwellings” and “The Bow.”
Commonly confused with
Giant Sequoia 🌿 Sequoiadendron giganteum shares the fibrous cinnamon bark at a distance, but sequoia foliage is awl-shaped and bristly in three dimensions, with large woody egg-shaped cones. Incense cedar's foliage is flat scale sprays with tiny wine-glass cones. 
