Strolling New Jersey's Cedar Swamps

The Atlantic white cedar is, in my mind, one of the loveliest, most majestic trees native to our Pinelands and shore. With its stout, straight trunk and soaring height, it’s New Jersey’s answer to California’s sequoias.

What it is: Chamaecyparis thyoides is not, in fact, a cedar. It’s actually a member of the cypress family, an ancient classification of trees, many adapted to live in swamps. We’ll carry on calling it by its common name, as most people do, even if it means irritating some botanists.

The evergreen can grow higher than 100 feet, with enormous trunks (the largest on record in New Jersey is 9 feet, 6 inches in circumference). Its needles look much like those of the popular landscaping shrub arborvitae: they’re scaly, green to blue-green and grow in flattened bunches. 

My favorite feature is its bark. It’s light gray with warm reddish undertones, furrowed and slightly peeling, and often grows with a pronounced twist, a characteristic for which I’ve never been able to find an adequate explanation. (Feel free to weigh in with ideas; I’ll tell you right off that I’m a longtime student of plant science and I’ve done some digging, and I still don’t know!)

Where to find it: White cedar swamps can be found all over the New Jersey Pine Barrens, though they’re shrinking; the swamps used to cover about 115,000 acres of the state, and now cover only about 30,000. 

The decline is partly due to the trees’ popularity for various commercial uses – the wood is highly rot-resistant ­– and also due to its dependence on tree-free areas to establish itself.

The white cedars are known as a catastrophe-dependent species, needing a stretch of space recently cleared of competition, whether by fire, flood or other means, in order to start growing. This is why you’ll often find nearly pure stands of cedars of similar age. 

But the area’s most dangerous invasive species ­– us – has plenty of reasons to discourage forest fires, and as a result, there have been fewer and fewer opportunities for new white cedar stands to spring up. 

Still, there are some beautiful swamps to explore in our area. Sandy Hook has some, as does Wall Township’s Shark River Park.

In Ocean County, Bass River State Forest has a towering stand of cedars.

A bit further north in Ocean Township’s Wells Mills County Park is one of the most beautiful white cedar stands I’ve seen, with giant twisted trunks shooting up from a boggy forest floor covered with trickling, tea-colored streams and springy sphagnum moss.

Why bother: Besides the beauty of the trees themselves, Atlantic white cedars define and create fascinating ecosystems within the forests where they grow. If you explore several, you’ll see similarities: the same kinds of understory plants, the same squishy, mossy ground, the same tannin-stained water.

The swamps are also home to some of New Jersey’s rarest endemic species, many of which are endangered. If you’re lucky, you might catch sight of the fluorescent bottlebrush-like flower of the swamp pink or hear the high croak of a Pine Barrens tree frog.