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Cupressus sempervirens 'Glauca' (Italian Cypress) - This is a columnar evergreen tree that grows to 40 to 60 feet tall and up to about 8 to 12 feet wide with age and has scale-like leaves that are a blue-green color and 1-inch-wide round cones. It is a fastigiate selection of the broader growing species.
Plant in full sun. It is drought tolerant and considered to be cold hardy to around 5 degrees F. A useful plant for making a narrow hedge or used solitary or in small groups as specimen plantings. It is commonly thought of as a cemetery tree.
Cupressus sempervirens is native to a large area of the eastern Mediterranean region from northeast Libya in north Africa east through northern Egypt, western Syria, western Jordon, Israel and Lebanon and then north into southern Turkey and back to the west through southeast Greece (Crete, Rhodes) and Cyprus, with a disjunct population in the mountains of northern Iran. Though this plant has been widely cultivated as an ornamental tree for millennia and arrived in Italy in ancient times, the names "Italian cypress" or "Tuscan Cypress" commonly used are technically incorrect as it did not originate there.
The name for the genus comes from the Latin name for the Italian cypress tree Cupressus sempervirens and the name first published by Carl Linnaeus in 1753. The common name "cypress" comes via the Old French 'cipres' from the Latin cyparissus, which is the Latinization of the Greek kypárissos. In Greek mythology, Kyparissos was a boy beloved by Apollo who turns the boy into a cypress tree so his tears can fall forever after he accidentally kills his pet deer. The specific epithet means evergreen from the Latin words 'semper' meaning "always" and 'virens' meaning "flourishing", "living" or "green". This narrow form is also considered to be a selection of the form called sempervirens (as opposed to horizontalis) and is synonymous with Cupressus sempervirens ssp. fastigata.
We grew this useful plant from 1980 until 2023.
The information about Cupressus sempervirens 'Glauca' that is displayed on this web page is based on research conducted in our nursery's horticultural library and from reliable online resources. We will also include observations made about this plant as it grows in our nursery gardens and other gardens that we have visited, as well how the crops have performed in containers in our nursery field. We also incorporate comments that we receive from others and welcome hearing from anyone with additional information, particularly if they share cultural information that aids others growing this plant.
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