Cedrus

• 1. Introduction

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  Cedrus, the genus we know simply as cedar, has been in demand by builders of temples and palaces for over 4,000 years. That record makes it the longest-serving conifer in human use. Before the word "cedar" appeared in its English form around 1000 CE, it traveled through Old English, Latin, and Greek, carrying a meaning that may originally have described junipers entirely. The trees that eventually inherited the name are towering, resinous, and built for mountains. How did a word that might have started with juniper become attached to one of the ancient world's most prized building materials? And what does a grove of cedars in northern Anatolia, 500 kilometers from the nearest wild population, have to do with a long-vanished empire? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. What a Cedar Is

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  A mature cedar can reach 30-40 meters, and in exceptional cases, up to 65 meters. The trunk is cylindrical, and while the crown starts as a narrow cone in youth, it grows irregular and wide with age. Older trees can develop several main branches that rival the central trunk in size. The bark shifts over a lifetime from pale grey-brown and smooth to dark grey-brown and split into ridges and scales.

  The leaves are evergreen needles that grow in two distinct arrangements. On long shoots, they spiral openly. On short shoots, they cluster densely, between 15 and 45 needles together. Their color ranges from bright grass-green to strongly glaucous pale blue-green, and the depth of that blue-green depends on how thick a layer of white wax coats each leaf. That wax is a physical defense against desiccation.

  The cones come in two kinds on the same tree, because cedars are monoecious. Pollen cones are slender, 3-8 centimeters long, and shed in autumn. Seed cones are barrel-shaped and equally 3-8 centimeters broad. When the seed cone matures, it disintegrates rather than opening cleanly, releasing winged seeds. The seeds carry two or three resin blisters containing an unpleasant-tasting resin, believed to discourage squirrels from eating them before the wind can carry them away. The entire cycle from pollination to ripe seeds takes exactly one year.

• 3. A Word With Deep Roots

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  The Greek word kédros is where the cedar's name originates, but the etymology is stranger than it first appears. The word does not seem to be derived from any language of the Middle East, which is unexpected given that the cedar's most famous groves grew in that region. Scholars have suggested that kédros may have originally named juniper species that grew in Greece itself, and the label was later transferred to the more distant trees we now call Cedrus because of their similarly aromatic wood.

  The word also branched in another direction. The term "citrus" shares the same root as cedrus, a linguistic connection that links the cedar to the citron tree through the common thread of distinctive scent. By the time "cedar" first appeared in recorded English around 1000 CE, it had already narrowed to its biblical meaning and referred specifically to Cedrus. The fluid boundary the word once had was gone.

• 4. Where Cedars Grow

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  Cedars occupy a narrow ecological niche: high mountain slopes in two widely separated regions. In the western Himalayas and in the Mediterranean, they grow at altitude, each population adapted to a different seasonal rhythm. Mediterranean cedars take their moisture mostly in winter, primarily as snow, and endure dry summers. Himalayan cedars receive the reverse arrangement, drawing on summer monsoon rainfall with only occasional winter snowfall.

  In Lebanon, the remaining wild cedars of Lebanon survive in small protected pockets. The Cedars of God, near the Qadisha Valley, is a World Heritage Site. Those groves represent what was once a far wider forest, and their protected status reflects how severely cedar populations have contracted.

  The genus faces a range of threats beyond habitat reduction. Fungal diseases include canker, collar rot, crown rot, root rot, needle blight, Gymnosporangium rusts, and sirococcus blight, the last caused specifically by Sirococcus tsugae, which kills shoots and branches. In drought conditions, otherwise robust trees become vulnerable to bark beetles. Pest pressure also comes from the giant conifer aphid, scale insects, nematodes including the pine wilt nematode, and the caterpillars of the pine processionary moth, which sometimes build their nests in cedars.

• 5. Four Thousand Years of Timber

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  The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest known works of literature, already treats cedar wood as precious and worth fighting over. From that period onward, cedars were in demand for building temples and palaces without interruption for over 4,000 years.

  The most striking evidence of that demand lies not in ancient texts but in genetics. Two small populations of Lebanon cedar grow in northern Anatolia, 500 kilometers north of the tree's main native range. Genetic studies, combined with environmental analysis, have confirmed what local oral tradition and Hittite cuneiform texts had long suggested: those isolated stands were not natural. They were deliberately planted, more than 3,200 years ago, to supply timber to the Hittite capital at Hattusa nearby. Someone in the Hittite Empire took the trouble to move and cultivate a forest to feed a construction program.

  Cedar wood's appeal is not merely historical sentiment. The wood is naturally resistant to decay and repels moths, as does the oil extracted from it. Cedar wood and cedarwood oil have an attractive, long-lasting scent that has kept both in use through the millennia. Today, cedars are also grown as ornamental trees across temperate climates wherever winter temperatures do not regularly fall below -25 degrees Celsius, with the Turkish cedar tolerating slightly colder conditions down to -30 degrees or just below.

• 6. Family, Fossils, and Taxonomy

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  The oldest fossil attributable to the genus Cedrus is Cedrus penzhinaensis, recovered from Early Cretaceous sediments of the Albian stage in Kamchatka, Russia. A second Early Miocene species, Cedrus anatolica, known from petrified wood in Turkey, is thought to be closely related to the living Atlas cedar.

  For a long time, cedars were assumed to be most closely related to firs in the genus Abies, partly because they share a similar cone structure and the seed cones of both disintegrate at maturity. Genetic evidence overturned that assumption. Cedars are now understood to be sister to all other lineages in the subfamily Abietoideae, meaning they branched off before any of the other groups in that subfamily diverged from one another.

  The genus itself was formally described by the German botanist Christoph Jacob Trew in his Plantae Selectae Quarum Imagines in 1757. Taxonomists have since disagreed over how many species it contains, with counts ranging from one to four depending on which authority is consulted. The Cyprus cedar is a clear example of that dispute: it is variously treated as a variety of Cedrus libani, as a subspecies, or as a full species called C. brevifolia. Some allozyme data even suggests it falls within the natural variation of the Turkish cedar. Where natural hybridization is impossible because the species are geographically separated, cultivation has bridged the gap. The Tesi nursery in northern Italy has been deliberately crossing Atlas and Deodar cedars since the 1980s, and the resulting hybrid group was formally named Cedrus Tesi Group in 2021.