Hesperocyparis guadalupensis Guadalupe cypress

Guadalupe cypress, Kingscote Gardens. Sairus Patel, 22 Oct 2024

Guadalupe cypress, Kingscote Gardens. Sairus Patel, 21 May 2021

An endangered species from Guadalupe Island, off the coast of Baja California, where it had almost been driven to extinction by feral goats. Once the Mexican government eradicated the ruminants in 2006, the cypress has been regenerating in the wild. It has performed spectacularly at Stanford for decades. Its smooth bark, with chocolatey patches – both milk and dark – and hints of cherry, peels off in small strips that remain curled up on the trunk like buff-colored cinnamon sticks. The airy bluish foliage forms a sort of cloud around the trunk, the branchlets finer than those of Arizona cypress.

A columnar form soars upward at lawn’s edge just south of the pond at Kingscote Gardens. Another, untended and unwatered, grows north of the Arizona Garden at the intersection of paths there. Its trunk leans quite steeply near the ground but then straightens up, allowing branches at its base to have the room to develop into perfectly upright trunks in their own right, perched upon the mother trunk. The age of our pair is uncertain; oddly, there are no records of them having been planted.

In a remarkable 1930s experiment at Stanford by plant pathologist Willis Wagener, among the 17 cypress family species tested (hundreds of trees), the 20 Guadalupe cypresses were found to grow almost as fast as the Monterey cypress in both height and trunk thickness, and to be the most free from pests and diseases. It was not at all susceptible to the dreaded cypress canker fungus (which had been discovered at Stanford a decade earlier, and formally described by Wagener himself). He concluded that Guadalupe cypress deserves wider usage.

Given what Wagener found about their vigorous growth rate, our two specimens are likely to be of 1990s or early 2000s vintage, and not part of Wagener’s experiment. At 1146 Waverley Street, Palo Alto, see a pair of ‘Greenlee’s Blue Rocket’ – an upright bluish selection similar to the one at Kingscote Gardens – just inside the gate. Since Guadalupe Island is part of the California Floristic Province, one can easily conceive of ‘Greenlee’s Blue Rocket’ and other upright cultivars as being the California answer to the Italian cypress.