Atlantic White Cedar Chamaecyparis thyoides
Atlantic White Cedar is a perennial tree native to the lower 48 states. It grows to 50 ft in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Chamaecyparis thyoides, a species of Cupressaceae, is native to the Atlantic coast of North America and is found from southern Maine to Georgia and along the Gulf of Mexico coast from Florida to Mississippi. It is one of two species of Chamaecyparis found in North America. C. thyoides resides on the East Coast and C. lawsoniana can be found on the West Coast. There are two geographically isolated subspecies, treated by some botanists as distinct species, by others at just varietal rank: Chamaecyparis thyoides thyoides and Chamaecyparis thyoides henryae (H.L.Li) E.Murray The species grows in forested wetlands where they tend to dominate the canopy. The trees are associated with a wide variety of other wetland species because of their wide north-south range. The remaining populations are now found mostly in remote locations that would be difficult to harvest, so its popularity as a source of lumber has decreased. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 3.5–6.3
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- Moderate
- Wet-soil tolerance
- High waterlogging
- Height
- 50 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 15 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 5–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Moderate
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Evergreen scale-leaved · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- 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 1 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Atlantic White Cedar — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
1 adult butterfly & moth species is recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 36 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Atlantic White Cedar, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Chamaecyparis →
How we know this (3) 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.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
Sources for this entry (36) 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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