Medium-sized to sometimes massive and aged evergreen shrubs or trees, some with broad irregularly tapering crowns. Female trees bear single seeds enclosed in an ultimately succulent aril forming fleshy berry-like structures when mature, which are usually bright red.

Evergreen trees or shrubs, with upright, fern-like foliage sprays of pinnately much branched minor branchlet systems. The mature foliage is bright, deep, glossy green. The female cones are upright and somewhat flask-like, topped with hooked spines.

Tall to eventually massive and towering, monoecious evergreen trees, often of highly imposing mature appearance in the wild. The upper branches are upsweeping in an often statuesque and celebratory fashion. They produce shoots which are stout throughout, bearing awl-like structures and Cryptomeria-like foliage through young tree stages, changing to entirely Sequoiadendron-like with age. They have a somewhat billowing tapering crown becoming eventually (many centuries) irregularly gaunt with age, freely shedding elongate female cones of surprisingly miniature size.

Tall, medium-sized to sometimes massive, monoecious evergreen trees, with strongly whorled branches and a typically conical, tapering crown. Tree crowns are symmetric, often slender and spire-like, their branch systems short and eventually mostly markedly down-sweeping, with the tips level or upcurving. Crowns bear with age elongate female cones hanging pendulously from near the uppermost branch tips. Unlike Abies, leaves of Picea fall eventually from their shoots (abundantly so if dried), leaving peg-like pulvini covering the shoots.

Small, medium-sized to sometimes large, monoecious evergreen trees, often with characteristically distinctively coloured or patterned bark, at first typically with a conical, tapering crown, but eventually widely open-crowned trees. Some become multi-trunked, and often eventually forming handsome tall-growing trees with foliage mainly in radially structured, clustered, bushy, open-billowing masses, and hence not arrayed into flattened sprays as in most Cupressus.

Dioecious, thin, slender and small evergreen trees, usually under 20 m, and 40 cm dbh. Bark is brown. Major branch and branchlet axes have indefinite and scarcely rhythmic growth; ultimate minor axes have definite and strongly rhythmic seasonal growth. Major branches are slender, flexible, spreading horizontally.

Small to medium-sized, evergreen trees, of generally willow-like appearance, the female ‘fruits’ of which have deep purple–red arils. In the field, easily confused with Podocarpus species, of overall extremely similar form, which often grow nearby. The Austrotaxus is distinguished by close examination of the upper leaf surfaces for its characteristic sunken, rather than raised, dorsal leaf midrib. These differences are also apparent in any seedling material arising nearby.

Plants without distinct leaves, but the apparent function of leaves replaced by the presence of very numerous broad, flattened rhombic phylloclades (each derived from a much modified expanded and flattened branchlet), all usually of somewhat variable and often irregularly compound shape with angular margins, each phylloclade with multiple conspicuous veins and often glossy-surfaced, especially on all dorsal aspects.

Monoecious or dioecious long-lived evergreen trees, with a conical, tapering crown when young, becoming stately with age and irregularly domed, bearing open, widely spaced irregular branch and sub-branch systems. The fresh branchlet undersurfaces are conspicuously white.

Tall to very tall and particularly elegant and stately monoecious evergreen trees, with an rather open conical crown when young, becoming irregularly pyramidal with age. The crowns are borne typically on tall, straight trunks, with numerous approximately whorled well-spaced slender branches and large yet thinly structured scale foliage arrayed in open, flattened fern-like sprays which are glossy bright green above and conspicuously marked with repeating white undersurface patterning on especially the larger scale leaves.

Medium-sized evergreen, soft-leaved, monoecious rainforest trees, to 25–30+ m when mature, with approximately whorled branch systems and a slender, more or less parallel to conic crown. Their shoot and branch systems are moderately stout, mostly markedly spreading-descending. The lateral shoots with age eventually terminate in small, elongate male or orbicular female cones directly from ultimate branches.

Much-branched woody shrubs to small trees of spreading to columnar cypress-like form, characterised by abundant slender ascending shoots bearing either spreading leaves or scale leaves. They have freely spreading tips and bunched or solitary long-persistent female cones, each with a basal whorl of sterile scales.