One look at this beautiful tree and its easy to see why so many people adore it. The texture of the flat-needled boughs is soft and wispy. No sharp or painful needles here. With a blue-green cast, this tree is also sometimes called the weeping blue Alaskan cedar, too.

The softly pyramidal shape of this tree, along with its weeping habit, make it an ideal landscape plant. During the growing season, small 1/3 inch brown to burgundy cones appear at the tips of the needles, but primarily on mature plants.

Native to the northwest region of North America, you’ll find these trees in the wild from Northern California up to Alaska. In backyard cultivation, Chamaecyparis nootkatensis has grown quite common, in particular the cultivar known as ‘Pendula’ (more on this later). In the wild, weeping Alaskan cedars reach up to a whopping 100 feet in height with a width of approximately 20 to 30 feet after decades of growth. But, in garden settings, they tend to top out at around 30 feet in height with a spread equal to half of that.

Winter hardiness of Chamaecyparis nootkatensis

Weeping Alaskan cedars, as you can imagine if you’re at all familiar with the climate in their native range, thrive in consistently moist soils where plenty of moisture is present year-round. The hardiness of a weeping Alaskan cedar, according to the USDA hardiness zones, is 4 through 7. Translated into the corresponding temperatures on the hardiness zone map, this means Chamaecyparis nootkatensis is winter hardy down to about -30 degrees F. This tree is a great fit for the entire northern tier of the US, the majority of Canada, and equivalent climates globally. It will not, however, thrive too far south of the 40th parallel where the summers and soil are too hot and dry.