Featured Plant

You may have walked down the Axis Lawn and passed this New Zealand conifer many times without noticing it. Take a moment to appreciate its distinctive foliage, mottled bark, and bright cones, and you’ll get to know a stately tree that matures along with you and will watch after the garden for hundreds of years.

Dacrydium cupressinum is a beautiful, long-lived tree with a straight, tapering trunk and dark, flaking bark. Young trees, such as ours at the San Francisco Botanical Garden, have graceful, weeping branches covered in scale-like leaves that will transition to bare trunks with smaller leaves as they age.

These titans of New Zealand’s hardwood forests can live up to 1,000 years and reach heights of 200 feet. The trees are dioecious, meaning male and female cones are found on separate trees.

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As a member of Podocarpaceae, Dacrydium cupressinum has a unique cone structure for a gymnosperm. Instead of a hard cone like the pine cones most are familiar with, male trees produce a berry-like cone that is dispersed by the animals that eat it. The fleshy cones it produces is not technically a botanical fruit—a hallmark of the angiosperms. Instead, this gymnosperm convergently evolved to reward animal partners for seed dispersal by offering them a tasty morsel. It’s not only the birds and lizards that use this plant for nutrition—when Captain James Cook chartered the coast of New Zealand for the British Admiralty in 1789, he made “spruce beer” for his crew from the young rimu branches as a preventative for scurvy!