Calocedrus formosana
species of plant
Calocedrus formosana, Taiwan Incense-cedar; Chinese: 臺灣肖楠; pinyin: tái wān xiào nán or 臺灣翠柏) is a conifer in the cypress family, Cupressaceae, endemic to Taiwan.
Descriptions
It is a medium-size tree to 20–25 m tall, with a trunk up to 3 meters in diameter. The bark is orange-brown weathering greyish, smooth at first, becoming fissured and exfoliating in long strips on the lower trunk on old trees. The foliage is produced in flattened sprays with scale-like leaves 1.5–8 mm long; they are arranged in opposite decussate pairs, with the successive pairs closely then distantly spaced, so forming apparent whorls of four; the facial pairs are flat, with the lateral pairs folded over their bases. The upper side of the foliage sprays is green without stomata, the underside is marked with dense patches of white stomata.
The seed cones are 10–15 mm long, pale purple with a whitish wax coating, with four (rarely six) scales arranged in opposite decussate pairs; the outer pair of scales each bears two winged seeds, the inner pair(s) usually being sterile; the cones are borne on a 4–6 mm long peduncle covered in small (2 mm) scale leaves. The cones turn brown when mature about 8 months after pollination. The pollen cones are 4–5 mm long.
Variety species
It is very similar to Calocedrus macrolepis, and some botanists treat it as a variety of that, C. macrolepis var. formosana.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Calocedrus formosana” as species of plant. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of plant. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q146734. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Calocedrus formosana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.