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Cupressaceae family

Incense Cedar Calocedrus decurrens

Native
Drought-tough — Rated High for drought tolerance, corroborated by mycorrhizal partners — a water-wise pick once it's established.
Deer-resistant — Low palatability to browsing deer. Usually passed over, but no plant is truly deer-proof when food is scarce.
Also known as: California Incense-cedar

Incense Cedar is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 100 ft in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.

More about this plant

Calocedrus decurrens, with the common names incense cedar and California incense cedar, is a species of coniferous tree native to western North America. It is the most widely known species in the genus, and is often simply called incense cedar without the regional qualifier. Wikipedia →

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Conditions
Sources · Conditions
USDA PLANTS — Sun · Soil & moisture
USDA — SoilPH — Soil pH
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fertility Requirement / Soil Adaptation — Fertility need · Adapts to
USDA — Temp-Min °F — Hardiness
Niinemets & Valladares 2006 (CC0) — Drought tolerance · Shade tolerance · Wet-soil tolerance
Sun
Full sun – part shade
Soil & moisture
Low moisture
Soil pH
4.6–7.1
Fertility need
Medium
Adapts to
Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
Hardiness
USDA zone 5+
Drought tolerance
High
Shade tolerance
Moderate
Wet-soil tolerance
Low waterlogging
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Height, Mature — Height
USDA Urban Tree DB (public domain) — open-grown crown width — Mature width
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Planting Density (per acre) — Spacing
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Growth Rate / Spread / Growth Form / Lifespan / Active Growth Period / Seed Period — Spread · Growth rate · Growth form · Active growth
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) · USDA PLANTS — Foliage
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Fruit/Seed Color / Fruit Persistence — Fruit
Lifespan: USDA’s lifespan scale for trees: short = under ~100 years · moderate = 100–250 · long = over 250. Balsam fir and other short-lived conifers are genuinely short for a tree, not short like an annual.
Height
100 ft
Mature width
≈ 15 ft wide open-grown, the broad end of measured crowns
Spacing
8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
Spread
None — clumping
Growth rate
Slow
Growth form
Single stem
Lifespan
Perennial · long-lived
Foliage
Evergreen scale-leaved · coarse texture
Active growth
Spring & summer
Fruit
Brown
In the garden
Sources · In the garden
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Propagation Method / Commercial Availability — Propagate by · In the trade
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Germination (cold stratification) — Seed starting
USDA PLANTS — Seed Period — Seeds ripen
USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — Foliage Texture / Browse Palatability / Resprout — Deer browsing · Resprouts if cut
Propagate by
Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
Seed starting
Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
Seeds ripen
Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
In the trade
Routinely available
Deer browsing
Low often deer-resistant
Resprouts if cut
No
Canopy layer — Sits in the canopy of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
Chop-and-drop biomass — Soft, low-density wood is quick-growing and easy to cut back — coppice it and drop the trimmings in place as mulch.Open guide →
derived roles
The garden year bloom → fruit → fall colour
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
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Pollen
Pollen cones
Pollen cones · May — USDA PLANTS · a gymnosperm doesn't flower; this is pollen-cone release (pollination / allergy timing), not a bloom
When to sow · for your area

Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.

Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0). ✦ = recorded on this exact species.
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird

Open records of who else uses Incense Cedar — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.

Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):

Poecile rufescens · Chestnut-Backed Chickadee
Interaction records (observations, not exhaustive) from GloBI → (CC0). Counts are distinct species; names are the most-recorded. Common names from Wikidata (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
Photosynthesis Direct fact

A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.

Kattge, J. et al. TRY plant trait database — Categorical Traits Dataset (2012).
Climate niche (heat tolerance & native rainfall) Derived

We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.

Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.

Realized-niche / climate-envelope approach (Pearson & Dawson 2003; Soberón 2007). Climate: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county normals (1991–2020).
Derived values are computed from open data by a published method — labelled, cited, and never shown as a direct observation. Full methodology →
Sources for this entry (34) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[17] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[19] Description — Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
[20] Ecological value — GloBI
[22] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[24] Functional traits — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[25] Photosynthetic pathway — TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0)
[26] Climate niche — Derived — realized climate niche from U.S. county occurrences (GBIF) × NOAA NCEI county climate normals 1991–2020 (public domain)
[27] Wildlife & visitors — GloBI — Global Biotic Interactions (CC0)
[31] Other common names — Wikidata (CC0)
[32] Stress tolerance — Niinemets & Valladares 2006 (CC0)
[33] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[34] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
Cite this page Open data, please attribute

PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).

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