Cyparissus, and the Grief Made a Tree

Ovid gives the tree its founding myth: Cyparissus, a youth beloved of Apollo, accidentally killed a tame stag that was dear to him, and in inconsolable grief begged the gods to let him mourn forever; he was changed into the cypress, the tree of sorrow, so that he might stand at the graves of others and share their grief. The tree's durable, fragrant, rot-resistant wood also gave it a paradoxical link to permanence, it was used for coffins and for the images of the gods, but its dominant meaning remained constant from antiquity onward: the cypress is the tree of death, mourning and the grave, its dark spire the recognised sign of a place of the dead.

The gopher wood from which Noah's ark is built in Genesis is another plant identity the text leaves genuinely unresolved: the Hebrew term appears nowhere else in the Bible, and while cypress is one of the most commonly proposed candidates, on the strength of its ancient shipbuilding use and its resistance to rot, other scholars have suggested cedar, juniper or simply a general term for resinous conifer timber, so that the exact tree behind one of scripture's most famous construction projects remains an open question rather than a settled fact.