Picture of the has been licensed under a GFDL
Permission: GNU Free Documentation License
Picture of the has been licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike.
Permission: Some rights reserved

Mediterranean Cypress

It is a medium-sized evergreen tree to 35 m tall, with a conic crown with level branches and variably loosely hanging branchlets. It is very long-lived, with some trees reported to be over 1,000 years old.

Cupressus sempervirens was known by the ancient Greeks and Romans as "the mournful tree", sacred to the rulers of the underworld and to their associates, the Fates and the Furies. It was customary to plant it by a grave, and, at the time of a death, to place it either before the house of the decedent or in the vestibule, to warn those about to perform a sacred rite against entering a place polluted by a dead body. No Roman funeral was complete without cypress. More

Cupressus sempervirens is the type species of the genus, defining the name Cupressus. More