Port Orford Cedar Chamaecyparis lawsoniana
Port Orford Cedar is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 200 ft in full sun, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, known as Port Orford cedar or Lawson's cypress, is a species of conifer in the genus Chamaecyparis, family Cupressaceae. It is native to Oregon and northwestern California, and grows from sea level up to 1,500 metres (4,900 ft) in the valleys of the Klamath Mountains, often along streams. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.2–7.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 6+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- High
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 200 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 15 ft wide wild/forest-grown — open-grown specimens spread wider
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Evergreen scale-leaved · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown persists into winter
- 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
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~8 caterpillar species
Chamaecyparis supports ~8 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
Recorded feeding on Chamaecyparis in North America, including:
Wildlife & visitors 3 birds
Open records of who else uses Port Orford Cedar — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 3 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Chamaecyparis →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
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.
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.
Sources for this entry (37) Open & cited
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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