Sawara cypress or Sawara falsecypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera) is a medium to large evergreen tree (maximum 164’) with a pyramid-shaped crown. The typical form is unremarkable and often thin, especially as the tree matures. Fine-textured medium green needles are tinted white beneath. Cones are small (1/4″ across) and ornamentally insignificant, appearing glaucous green during summer before turning black-brown when ripe. Bark is reddish-brown and peels in strips. Native to Japan, Sawara falsecypress was first introduced to Western cultivation around 1860. The name pisifera from Latin pisum, pea, and ferre, to bear, alludes to the small round cones. Sawara is its Japanese name. The plant is pictured on the traditional blue and white “willow pattern.
Common name: Sawara Cypress
Scientific Name (order and family): Chamaecyparis pisifera (Siebold & Zuccarini) Endlicher (Cupressaceae, Cupressales)
Species Native Origin: Japan
Habit: 50 -70’ tall; 10 – 20’ wide, broadly conical –pyramidal with a loose open habit and numerous branchlets thickly covered with slender feathery sprays; Streambanks in mountains. Zone 4 – 8.
Trunk/Stem: Bark red brown, peeling in thin strips.
Leaves: Evergreen, scale-like. Leaves very small with free, pointed tips, glossy yellow-green above with conspicuous white marks beneath in flattened aromatic sprays. Leaves at side of shoots slightly larger than those above and below.
Flowers: Monoecious. Male flowers brownish; female lfower pale brown in small clusters at the tip s of the shoots in spring.
Fruits and seeds: Fruit, a rounded-cone, like a soccer ball, 1/6 – 1/4” wide matures from green to brown. It appears as a clustered crowd on a short stalk. Scales 6 -10, yellowish brown, soft woody; upper side wrinkled, the middle is depressed with a small mucro at the depression. Seeds 1 – 2 ovoid and bulbous on both sides, glandular, wing broad, membranous, notched above and below