Although the common names are geographical, such as the Italian cypress, Tuscan cypress, Persian cypress, to name a few, it is native to the whole eastern mediterranean basin, through to western Syria, Israel and western Jordan. The species name sempervirens comes from the Latin for 'evergreen' and there are two "types" or forms of the tree, fastigiate and horizontal. By horizontal, we mean the typical mountain Cypress form, with a wider triangular crown. Science suggests that the horizontal form will predate human activity, whereas the fastigiate form has a horticultural origin dating to early historic or prehistoric times. There are no subspecies or true varieties and the vast majority of the trees in cultivation are selected cultivars with a fastigiate crown, with erect branches forming a narrow to very narrow crown, often less than a tenth as wide as the tree is tall. C. sempervirens is the true species form, and all other forms are found in the old Cultivar Group - Cupressus sempervirens. var. pyramidalis (syn. var. fastigiata, var. Stricta, var. Totem, etc). all with the familiar tall pencil-like form.

We also offer the cloned 'pyramidalis' forms as 'Totem' and 'Stricta' - these will be propagated by vegetative cuttings and/or grafted onto selected Cupressus rootstock, and they are clones of the parent tree. They should not be variable, unless their parentage is accidentally mixed up somewhere in their production. Having said all this, many of the typical 'Tuscan Cypress' forms you see are in fact pruned regularly and the branches are often tied back into the main trunk to control their shape, they don't just come out of the box like this, a lot of work goes into trimming them up, both in the landscape and in the nursery production.