The Kashmir Cypress of the Botanical Garden

This tree belongs to a species that survives today largely because it has been useful to Buddhist ceremony as much as to botany. Cupressus cashmeriana is the national tree of Bhutan, found wild only in the eastern Himalayas between roughly 1,500 and 2,800 metres of altitude, and it has long been deliberately preserved around Buddhist temples and monasteries even as habitat loss elsewhere pushed it onto international conservation watch lists. Western science only formally described it in 1848, when British botanist William Griffith encountered it in Kashmir and initially misnamed it, before John Forbes Royle corrected the naming to reflect the region where it was first documented. Valencia's specimen grows in the university's Jardí Botanic, one of the oldest botanical gardens in Spain, on Carrer Quart near the city's old medieval walls, its foliage a distinctive bright blue-green among the garden's wider conifer collection. No individual age or planting date is documented for this specimen, so any figure given is a broad estimate rather than a verified record, but the species' own rarity, not its size or age, is what makes it worth including here.