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Tall evergreen trees with bright-green, uniformly presented, overlapping and relatively large scale-like leaves of slightly fleshy appearance, which resemble lizard scales above and are prominently figured with bright-white markings within hollowed scale centres beneath.
Tall, and always remarkably erect, eventually large, dioecious evergreen, long-lived, resiniferous trees. When young and often throughout life they have very strongly whorled and stout, more or less level to typically somewhat ascending branch systems, usually with upturning tips, with the lower branch whorls either retained or eventually shed to leave clean trunks which sometimes bear further foliar episodes of crown reiteration from middle to higher portions of the trunk. Tree crowns generally highly symmetric.
A small tree of yew-like appearance, but differing mainly in having a spike of pollen cones with small scale leaves positioned between whorls of sporophylls, and females with yew-like arils which are white, rather than red, at maturity.
Moderate to large in size, tall and usually long-lived evergreen trees, with multiple slender, widely spaced branch and branchlet systems bearing typically willow-like (salignoid) leaves, which are dorsiventrally flattened to form distinctive upper and lower surfaces, each with a raised midrib along the dorsal side. The whole forms, when mature, usually broad open crowns borne from smoothly thin-barked trunks.
Tall, long-lived forest trees with rough-barked trunks, mostly developing a broad-crowned habit with age, bearing massive boughs and widely spreading flattened branch systems, giving mature trees a particularly stately and majestic habit with age, especially when growing in open park-like landscapes. Distinguished from Picea by the presence of short shoots with clustered leaves, and female cones which are stiffly erect, never pendulous, throughout life to maturity.
Medium-sized to tall and slender, evergreen trees of rather pine-like initial appearance, of slender habit and with slender horizontally spreading branches, with leaves of more Pseudotsuga-like habit, and the foliage bright green and relatively short-lived.
Moderate to large-sized, fast-growing, evergreen trees, mostly with dense, narrow, tapering pyramidal crowns. Leaves are ultimately shed cleanly by basal abscission zones which leave smooth, nearly circular scars to their shoots. Unlike Picea, leaves remain persistent on their shoots when branches are dried. Female cones are erect and seed liberation is by dismemberment of cone scales from the central columella, allowing both seed and scales to fall individually in the wind.
Cupressoid evergreen trees, the fresh branchlets with foliage are mostly held in vertical planes. The leaves are collectively somewhat spanner-like in shape, each etched across one or both surfaces with conspicuous white detailed markings. The pellucid foliage and characteristic white markings particularly distinguishes Austrocedrus.
Tall, pyramidal and often massive evergreen trees, typically with straight trunks and often irregularly protruding main branch systems, distinguished from Abies by their more irregular foliar habit and pendulous female cones with exerted trifid bracts.
Monopodial evergreen, mostly tall, long-lived forest trees with pillar-like trunks and canopy-emergent crowns. The foliage is bright green, of two types with few intermediates mixed together on the same shoot or mostly of one type predominant on different shoots. Leaves are small, symmetric, triangular, basally adpressed, spreading scale-like to awl-shaped, or larger, non-scale-like and bilaterally flattened, obliquely spreading into two opposite comb-like pectinate rows forming frond-like branchlet sprays. Foliage develops a billowing appearance en-masse.
Evergreen shrubs or small trees of strongly architectural appearance, with foliage superficially of tropical Araucaria-like form but regularly ranked along the shoots into eight-ranked arrays, combined with an open, markedly candelabriform, overall tree habit.
Fairly long-lived, often mountain ridge trees of medium size, with rough-barked trunks. They mostly develop a broad but open-crowned and sometimes gaunt habit with age. The foliage and shoots with rounded leaf scars have a general similarity to Abies, from which plants are clearly distinguished by their rougher bark, high tendency to sprout epicormic shoots, leaves with a midrib (and not groove) prominent above, male cones in umbellate clusters, and female cones long-retained and not dismembering from the tree at maturity.
Slender shrubs or small trees with many slender and highly flexible spreading-ascending branches, clothed mainly with approximately ranked, forward-swept leaves. Laterals are more or less adnate, attached by a broad base, mostly unusually and conspicuously bilaterally flattened and cladode-like, collectively obliquely spreading into flattened pinnate ranks, each leaf tapering and linear–falcate in outline.
Large, evergreen trees, when mature with tall columnar trunks and narrow, willow-like foliage, with, unusually, each leaf rather similar on both surfaces.