Tall evergreen trees, broad, irregular crown, bark dark gray. Branches with short shoots. Needles stiff, mostly in dense clusters on short shoots. Cedrus are native to the mountains of the southern and southeastern Mediterranean region and the western Himalayas.
According to the World Flora Online (WFO) Plant List, the genus Cedrus has the following accepted names:
- Cedrus atlantica (Atlas Cedar)
- Cedrus brevifolia (Cypris Cedar)
- Cedrus deodara (Himalayan Cedar)
- Cedrus libani (Cedar of Lebanon)
However, this view is not unanimous. Although Cedrus deodara is well defined, isolated in the western Himalayas, and broadly accepted. Whereas the taxonomic positions of populations in the Mediterranean basin, i.e., C. atlantica, C. brevifolia, and C. libani, are controversial. They have traditionally been treated as three distinct species, sometimes as two, and more recently several molecular and phylogenetic studies have even suggested that the Mediterranean Cedars represent a single species, namely C. libani, and the two others as subspecies, e.g., C. libani subsp. atlantica and C. libani subsp. brevifolia. See Trees and Shrubs Online, and https://www.treesandshrubsonline.org/articles/cedrus/ for details.