The Mediterranean cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) — also known as the pencil cypress or mourning cypress — is a slender, evergreen conifer in the cypress family. Its original range spans Greece, the Aegean islands, Crete, Cyprus, Syria, Israel, Cilicia, and Lebanon through to southwestern Iran; it was introduced to Italy in antiquity, and later to France and Spain. Under favourable conditions it shows remarkable height growth of four to six metres within ten years; it is considered a highly adaptable, drought-resistant pioneer species, thriving on chalk, marl, and clay soils as much as on dry, poor ground. Some trees live for over a thousand years. Its pleasantly scented, hard, dense-grained wood has been prized since antiquity for its exceptional resistance to rot.

In antiquity, cypress wood was so valuable that a cypress plantation was considered a fitting dowry for a daughter; it was used for posts, roof beams, wine presses, tables, and musical instruments, and in Assyria for statues, temple doors, sarcophagi, and wands used in necromancy. In Ottoman culture, cypress is regarded as the tree of life, and its form still adorns Turkish fountains, gravestones, and prayer rugs. For the ancient Greeks, it was simultaneously a symbol of grief and of metamorphosis. According to Orphic tradition, two rivers spring up in the underworld at the foot of a white cypress — to the right, Mnemosyne, memory; to the left, Lethe, forgetting. According to legend, the youth Cyparissus, inconsolable after accidentally killing his tame stag, was transformed by Apollo into a cypress tree: "you shall forever be mourned by us," the god says in Ovid, "and, near to the grieving, shall mourn others too." Cypresses also grew around the ancient Oracle of Delphi, likely part of the ritual burnings performed by the Pythia.

Burned as incense, cypress releases a clear, resinous-woody scent with a cool, almost balsamic freshness — reminiscent of a coniferous forest after rain, grounding and never heavy. Even in Christian times it remained an evergreen symbol of longevity and the immortality of the soul. Its smoke is still used today to cleanse spaces, support meditation, and mark ceremonies of remembrance, offering a sense of comfort, inner calm, and quiet reflection — a scent long associated with the passage between worlds.