Distribution. Borders of mountain streams, California, nowhere common but widely distributed from Mendocino County to the Santa Cruz Mountains in the coast region and along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada from Eldorado to Tulare Counties at altitudes of 3000°—5000° above the sea; most abundant and of its largest size on the northern coast ranges.
Rarely cultivated as an ornamental tree in California and western Europe.
Trees or shrubs, with brown or dark purple scaly bark, and spreading usually horizontal branches. Leaves flat, often falcate, gradually narrowed at the base, dark green, smooth and keeled on the upper surface, paler, papillate, and stomatiferous on the lower surface, their margins slightly thickened and revolute. Flowers diœcious or monœcious: the male composed of a slender stipe bearing at the apex a globular head of 4—8 pale yellow stamens consisting of 4—6 conic pendant pollen-sacs peltately connate from the end of a short filament; the female sessile in the axils of the upper scale-like bracts of a short axillary branch, the ovule erect, sessile on a ring-like disk, ripening in the autumn into an ovoid-oblong seed gradually narrowed and short-pointed at apex, marked at base by the much-depressed hilum, about ⅓′ long, entirely or nearly surrounded by but free from the now thickened succulent translucent sweet scarlet aril-like disk of the flower open at apex; seed-coat thick, of two layers, the outer thin and membranaceous or fleshy, the inner much thicker and somewhat woody; albumen uniform.
Taxus with six or seven species, which can be distinguished only by their leaf characters and habit, is widely distributed through the northern hemisphere, and is found in eastern North America where two species occur, in Pacific North America, Mexico, Europe, northern Africa, western and southern Asia, China, and Japan. Of the exotic species the European, African, and Asiatic _Taxus baccata_ L., and its numerous varieties, is often cultivated in the United States, especially in the more temperate parts of the country, and is replaced with advantage by the hardier _Taxus cuspidata_ S. & Z., of eastern Asia in the northern states, where the native shrubby _Taxus canadensis_ Marsh, with _monœcious_ flowers is sometimes cultivated.