The Lone Fir Incense Cedar

This incense cedar is 37 metres tall and only four metres across, which makes it look less like a tree than a column. Those are the city register's figures, and the height, 121 feet, is unusually tall for the species. The spread is the other half of the shape. Thirteen feet across on a tree that tall gives it the narrow, clean-edged outline the Southeast Examiner singled out in 2026 when it named the cemetery's three historic trees. The trunk is 3.38 metres round. It shares that designation with the Lone Fir itself, the Douglas fir the cemetery is named for, about 170 metres to the west, and with a bigleaf maple named for Joseph Lane. The city designated both conifers heritage trees in 2009. Seeing them together is the easiest way to read the difference between the two species: the fir heavier and broader, the cedar all height. Incense cedar is native to the mountains of Oregon and California, and its soft, fragrant wood was for generations the standard wood for pencils. Here it grows among the graves of a cemetery that was renamed in 1866 and now works as Portland's second-largest arboretum, on grounds owned by Metro and open during posted daylight hours. What nobody has published is its age. No source we found gives a planting date or a ring count, and we would rather leave the number blank than guess. If you know when it went in, tell us.