Chamaecyparis lawsoniana (Lawson's Cypress)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, photographed by Stephen James McWilliam — fig. a Stephen James McWilliam, CC0 1.0 / 2021-05-25 / obs. 131464509

Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, photographed by Robert H. Wardell — fig. d Robert H. Wardell, CC0 1.0 / obs. 116521155

Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, photographed by Maureen Howard — fig. f Maureen Howard, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 103563298

Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, photographed by wild_wind — fig. g wild_wind, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 103106816

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 1239630
Filed as: Chamaecyparis lawsoniana (A.Murray bis) Parl.
Det. by: M. Bauer 2007-01-01
Collected: M. Bauer 2007-06-09
Origin: US
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Chamaecyparis lawsoniana, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
California	CAL	NORTHERN AMERICA
Oregon	ORE

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,296 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-4.2 °C	1.7 °C	7.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	17.4 °C	21.3 °C	30.6 °C
Annual rainfall	682 mm	1,581 mm	2,816 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	41 mm	115 mm	313 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,296 research-grade observations of Chamaecyparis lawsoniana that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 49 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Chamaecyparis allumii (Webster) Heydt
Chamaecyparis boursieri f. viridis Hartwig & Rümpler
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. alba-spica (Gordon) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. aluminii Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. argentea (P.Lawson ex Gordon) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. erecta (H.Jaeger) C.K.Schneid.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. filiformis Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. fletcheri Rehder
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. fraseri Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. glauca (H.Jaeger) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. glaucescens Rehder
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. gracilis (J.Nelson) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. intertexta (R.Sm.) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. lutea C.K.Schneid.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. nana Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. pendula (Beissn.) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. pendula-alba (Paul ex Gordon) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana f. pendula-vera Voss
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana var. argentea (P.Lawson ex Gordon) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana var. billwoodiana Dallim. & A.B.Jacks.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana var. glauca (H.Jaeger) W.Hochst.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana var. minima-glauca (R.Sm.) Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana var. nana-glauca Beissn.
Chamaecyparis lawsoniana var. pendula Beissn.

and 25 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.