Cedar trees: how to identify red, white and true cedars

Eastern red cedar is a juniper, not a cedar

The tree most Americans call red cedar is Juniperus virginiana. The USDA Forest Service's Silvics of North America lists it under the names red juniper and savin and says it grows in every state east of the 100th meridian, often on dry, exposed sites and in abandoned fields. Mature trees usually stand 40 to 50 feet tall and 12 to 24 inches in diameter at breast height.

To recognize it, check three things:

• Two kinds of leaves. Virginia Tech describes tiny four-sided scales about 1/16 inch long, dark green and held tightly to the twig, and longer dark blue-green needle-like leaves about 1/4 inch, more common on young trees and fast-growing shoots. Run your hand up a young tree and it feels prickly.
• Berry-like cones. Only female trees carry them, since the species is dioecious. They are about 1/4 inch across, light green in spring and dark blue with a whitish bloom by fall. The Forest Service traces the color from green through greenish white and whitish blue to bluish over the season.
• Stringy bark. Red-brown, peeling in long, fibrous strips, often ashy gray where exposed (Virginia Tech).

The form helps from a distance: a small tree with a dense egg-shaped or columnar crown, up to about 60 feet. The Forest Service also ranks it among the top five Christmas trees and notes that its wood supplies cedarwood oil.

How to identify red cedar trees: eastern or western

"Red cedar" means two different trees depending on the coast. In the East it is the juniper above. In the Pacific Northwest it is western redcedar (Thuja plicata), which the Forest Service calls the only Thuja native to western North America, also known as Pacific redcedar, giant-cedar and canoe-cedar. It grows from Humboldt County, California, north to southeastern Alaska, and inland from British Columbia into western Montana and northern Idaho. Trees often live 800 to 1,000 years.

Western redcedar has no berries. Look for flat, drooping sprays of yellow-green scales; turn one over and the underside shows a white, butterfly-shaped pattern. Its cones are woody, about 1/2 inch long and turned up on the branches. The bark is thin, fibrous and reddish brown and comes off in long strips, and the base of an old trunk is often swollen and fluted. Virginia Tech gives it up to 200 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter.

White cedar and arborvitae

Northern white cedar, eastern white cedar and eastern arborvitae are one species, Thuja occidentalis. Readers in Canada know it as eastern white cedar, the name Natural Resources Canada uses (see the Canada tree identification guide), and its French name is thuya occidental. In the United States the Forest Service places it in the northern states and southern Canada, from Nova Scotia and Maine to Manitoba and Minnesota, abundant in swamps and seeps and on cliffs and old pastures. It grows fastest on calcium-rich soils of limestone origin, and trees on cliffs can pass 900 years.

Its foliage is the giveaway: flattened shoots arranged in fans, usually horizontal and stiff, dull yellowish green and turning bronze in winter, with conspicuous resin glands on the scales (Natural Resources Canada). The cones are small, 7 to 12 mm by NRCan's measure and 8 to 15 mm by the Forest Service's, egg-shaped and held upright on a short, curved stalk. The bark peels in long, narrow, flat strips, shiny reddish brown when young and gray with age.

Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides) is the look-alike. Virginia Tech lists northern white cedar among the trees it resembles. Its branchlets are slender and irregular rather than flattened sprays, its blue-green scales have white margins and smell strongly when crushed, and its round cones are about 1/4 inch, blue or purple with a bloom. The trunk grows as a slender column that becomes spire-like.

True cedars: Atlas, Lebanon and deodar

True cedars belong to the pine family, not the cypress family. Oregon State University's Landscape Plants database now treats the genus Cedrus as two species: deodar cedar (C. deodara) of the Himalayas and cedar of Lebanon (C. libani) of the Mediterranean. Atlas cedar, from the Atlas Mountains of Algeria and Morocco and the one most used in landscaping, is now considered a subspecies of cedar of Lebanon, although nurseries still sell it as C. atlantica. Blue forms sold as 'Glauca' are common, and OSU notes Atlas cedar is not hardy for much of the US (it is hardy to USDA Zone 6).

You will meet them planted, not wild. Look for:

• Needles in tufts. About 2 cm (3/4 inch), clustered 10 to 20 on short spur shoots, single along the leading twigs.
• Upright barrel cones. Female cones stand on the branches, 5 to 7.5 cm (2 to 3 inches) long, and take two years to mature.
• Shape. Pyramidal when young, flat-topped with age.

OSU describes Atlas cedar's branch tips as tending not to droop. Separating the three true cedars from a single branch is hard enough that botanists have merged two of them into one species.

Cedar vs pine tree identification

Cedar vs pine is the easiest split. Pines grow their needles in bundles of 2, 3 or 5 held together at the base by a papery sheath; the pine page has a needles-per-bundle chart. A true cedar's tufts hold 10 to 20 needles on a stubby, woody spur shoot, with no sheath. A true cedar's cones stand upright on top of the branch like small barrels. The native "cedars" are even easier to separate from pines, because they have flat or four-sided scales instead of needles.

Cedar vs cypress tree identification

Here the names get in the way: eastern red cedar, white cedar, Atlantic white cedar and western redcedar all belong to the cypress family, Cupressaceae, in Virginia Tech's fact sheets. Telling a "cedar" from a "cypress" really means telling genera apart, and the foliage and cone do it:

1. Fleshy, berry-like blue cones: a juniper, such as eastern red cedar.
2. Flat, fan-like sprays and small upright woody cones: Thuja, northern white cedar or western redcedar.
3. Irregular, slender branchlets and tiny round cones with 4 or 5 scales: Atlantic white cedar, a false cypress (Chamaecyparis). Virginia Tech lists Sawara-cedar, Hinoki falsecypress and Leyland cypress among its look-alikes.
4. Needles in tufts on spur shoots: a true cedar, pine family.

Baldcypress and the other cypresses are in the conifer identification guide. Bark helps less than foliage here, since most of these trees have thin, stringy bark; the bark identification guide covers the textures. If the tree has single needles spaced along the twig, compare spruce and fir next.

When you can't reach the branches, a photo still helps. Tree Identifier names a tree from one photo of the foliage spray, a cone or the bark, and its Collection includes northern white cedar, western redcedar and the three true cedars. Take the picture close enough to show the scales or the needle tufts, and include a cone if you can find one.