The cypress, Cupressus sempervirens, is a tall, dark, columnar evergreen of the Mediterranean, and across the classical and later European world it is the tree of death and mourning above all others. It was sacred to the underworld and to its gods, planted in cemeteries, where its narrow dark form still stands, and its branches were carried at funerals and set at the door of a house in mourning. Its very evergreen persistence, which might have made it a sign of life, was turned the other way: because a cut branch does not regrow, it was read as an emblem of a death from which there is no return.
In an entirely different tradition, Persian and later Ottoman and Mughal poetry reads the cypress not as death but as an image of the beloved's slender, upright grace, sarv in Persian, a stock comparison running through centuries of lyric verse and echoed in the tall, tapering cypress trees still planted in formal Persian and Mughal gardens as living architecture rather than as any sign of mourning. The tree's famously rot-resistant timber also made it a preferred wood for ancient Mediterranean shipbuilding, and Iran's Cypress of Abarkuh, a single tree of great and disputed age, is claimed by some local tradition to be over four thousand years old, though the figure is not confirmed by any scientific dating and should be treated with real caution.