I certainly hope this is really Cryptomeria japonica. It looks so strange with the leaf lengths so varied, and some leaves so curled, that the branches look like kind of wiggly. Is this just what the species can look like, or is it some fancy cultivar? It's planted along the walkway into the quarry at Queen Elizabeth Park; the city would have been able to obtain anything unusual, and this area features interesting specimen trees.
We love our Cryptomeria Japonica Sekkan Sugi and your last two photos Wendy are very typical of ours.
Definitely a Sugi cultivar, wouldn't like to put a cultivar name to it though; there's hundreds to select from.
'Sekkan' is a yellow foliage form of orthodox leaf structure - plant asked about here is something else. Maybe Parks has planting records telling what it is.
Reminds me of Cryptomeria japonica 'Rasen', which I have seen marketed locally in the past few years.
Wikipedia photos of 'Rasen' do look very similar. Thanks, Eric. Ron B's description of 'Sekkan' is exactly as is described in the Vancouver Trees app, so I'm feeling a lot less confused now.
Supposedly 'Sekkan' equates to something like "snow mantled" or "mantled with snow" in reference to the pale whitish or yellowish upper crown. But I think I have also seen one or two versions with different meanings.
Google Translate for instance comes up with sekkan = sarcophagus. But I was talking about at least one discussion of the cultivar specifically that gave something other than "snow mantled" as an English approximation.
Pics 6 & 7 look like C. j. 'Spiralis', but this character isn't evident in pics 1-5. Could there be two separate plants involved?
That's interesting. There are two trunks. The second habit photo goes with Pics 6 & 7, on the right side of the tree when looking at it from the path. Here is a crop, though, from the 3rd Pic, with a little of the spiraling. Actually, photos of 'Spiralis' and 'Rasen' look indistinguishable to me in many photos, and maybe a little more uniformly spiraled. I didn't even notice the spiraling when I was there - it was the uneven length of the leaves and the wiggly branches that attracted me.
