Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cedrus, commonly called cedar, is a genus of coniferous trees in the family Pinaceae. The trees are native to the mountains of the western Himalayas and the Mediterranean region, where they grow at high altitudes and are adapted to mountainous climates.
The English word cedar derives from Old English ceder, which came from Latin cedrus, itself from Greek kédros. The Greek word may originally have applied to juniper species in Greece and was later transferred to the Cedrus genus because of their similarly aromatic wood. By around 1000 CE, the English form had fixed to its biblical sense referring specifically to Cedrus.
Cedar trees have been valued for timber for over 4,000 years, from the period of the Epic of Gilgamesh onward. This is the longest record of any conifer in continuous human use.
The oldest known Cedrus fossil is Cedrus penzhinaensis, found in Early Cretaceous sediments of the Albian stage in Kamchatka, Russia. A second fossil species, Cedrus anatolica from Early Miocene deposits in Turkey, is thought to be closely related to the living Atlas cedar.
The German botanist Christoph Jacob Trew formally described the genus Cedrus in his work Plantae Selectae Quarum Imagines in 1757.
Genetic studies and environmental analyses confirm those isolated populations were deliberately planted by humans more than 3,200 years ago. Local oral tradition and Hittite cuneiform texts both support the conclusion that the trees were cultivated to supply timber to the nearby Hittite capital at Hattusa.