Dacrydium Sol. ex Lamb.

Usually dioecious shrubs to large trees as much as 40 m tall. Bark hard and smooth with fissures and breaking off in plates, with numerous small lenticels, reddish brown and weathering to gray, slightly fibrous within. Profusely branched with the major side branches in many species curving gradually upward candelabra-like and the ultimate branches aggregated into dense tufts, others less formal or even drooping. The apex of a resting foliage shoot loosely covered by a cluster of short leaves or scales. Leaves spirally placed. Juvenile leaves awl-shaped, spreading sharply from a briefly decurrent base at about a 75° angle and the tip in nearly every species bent more or less forward in a gradual curve, lanceolate or linear-lanceolate, acute to apiculate, strongly keeled on the dorsal (abaxial) side and slightly or not at all on the axial side, roughly tetragonal to triangular in cross section, normally longer and occasionally more slender than the mature leaves. Leaves on mature plants more variable among the species, from small keeled adpressed scales 1 mm long to linear leaves or needles as much as 2 cm long, straight to strongly incurved at the tip, tetragonal in cross section or keeled on the dorsal side and flat or even strongly concave on the axial surface, in some cases as much as six times as wide as thick, apex blunt to narrowly acute. Where adult leaves differ sharply from the juvenile leaves the transition may be gradual or almost abrupt and juvenile shoots mixed with adult foliage are often seen. Fertile structures usually start with a few reduced leaves and are placed either terminally or laterally, often both, but in the species without lateral structures they may nevertheless be on short lateral branches. The cylindrical pollen cones may be solitary with a few reduced sterile leaves on a subtending axis or they may be clustered with one or more lateral cones in the axils of reduced leaves beside an often slightly larger terminal cone. Microsporophylls either with a triangular apex tapering from the pollen sacs or with a lanceolate apex sharply narrower than the pollen sacs. Seed-bearing structure with slightly enlarged scale-shaped bracts or with bracts resembling normal leaves and distinctly longer than the reduced leaves which they follow and more or less expanded at their base. The entire seed-bearing structure with the exception of the apical part of the bracts has been observed in the majority of species to become greatly enlarged, fleshy, and red when mature. In two middle latitude (New Zealand) species (the genus Lagarostrobus QUINN) the fertile bracts are not subterminal as in the remaining species, where usually one or in some species two or more may be fertile. The solitary ovule of a fertile bract is cupped by an epimatium which represents the fertile scale and which lies between the ovule and the subtending fertile bract. In a few species the ovule apex at pollination is only slightly inverted and faces inward towards the fertile axis, but in most species it is strongly inverted while in all species it gradually turns upward as the seed develops until it reaches a nearly upright position. Seeds become dark brown and have the same shape as those of Phyllocladus.