Cupressus nevadensis Abrams, 1919

Cupressus nevadensis Abrams is one of the rarest cypress species of the New World. Mrs. Leo Polkinghorn was the first to identify a grove of trees growing on Red Hill near Bodfish as different from juniper (Juniperus californica), which abounds south of Lake Isabella. She and Mr. Herziger in 1907 sent specimens to William Dundley at Standford University. Later these herbarium specimens came to the attention of LeRoy Abrams. Abrams subsequently visited the Red Hill stand in 1915 and used this colony as the type locality for this cypress species, which he described in 1919. He named it Cupressus nevadensis after the Sierra Nevada, because he believed it was the first recorded cypress from the mountain range. Twisselmann postulated that C. nevadensis is a relic precariously surviving on the western edge of what has once been waste woodland. Fossil C. nevadensis was discovered in a Miocene bed in Sand Canyon, only 18 km south of the Back Canyon grove of Piute cypress. Another fossil record shows the more recent desert occurrence of a cypress closely related to C. arizonica and C. nevadensis. The record was a wood similar to that of C. nevadensis found in the region occupied by Piute cypress. It is certainly a reasonable theory that Piute cypress is a remnant of a once widespread complex occurring across the Mojave Desert and that it has been progressively restricted by increasing aridity and associated factors.