Medium-sized to tall (to 40 m), deciduous trees, with distinctive multi-tiered crown shapes and straight or crooked trunks, bearing abundant fan-like sprays of summer bright-green, autumn bright-yellow, then winter-deciduous foliage. Their wider (and much later seasonally flushing) leaves arise along branchlets in a single plane and more golden autumn colours distinguish Pseudolarix from Larix.

Low-growing spreading shrubs, the branches and branchlets spreading, with cupressoid acicular-tipped foliage, the seed-bearing organs of which are few-scaled cones each bearing one large blackish seed.

Tall, long-lived forest trees with rough-barked trunks, mostly developing a broad-crowned habit with age, with widely spreading flattened branch systems, giving mature trees a particularly stately and majestic habit with age. They are distinguished from Picea by the presence of short shoots with clustered leaves, and female cones which are erect and never pendulous at maturity.

Medium-sized to tall evergreen trees, with a conical, tapering crown, the foliage predominantly of small-sized scale leaves cladding flattened fern-like foliar sprays, often freely bearing crops of small, spherical cones, the foliage with only a faint, never acrid smell when crushed, sometimes described as slightly grass- or parsley-like.

Tall to sometimes massive evergreen trees with a typically conical, tapering crown when young, becoming billowing and multi-domed with age, with numerous semi-rigid glossy-surfaced awl-shaped leaves radiating all around the shoots. The male cones when present are small and numerous per shoot, each nearly sessile in the axil of a leaf near the growing tip of a branchlet. The female cones are globular, on the tips of short spur branchlets lateral to growing branchlet tips. Each cone bract–scale unit has numerous forward-pointing awns.

Distinctively tall to very tall and sometimes massive, columnar, dense-crowned, evergreen trees. The crowns are symmetric, becoming extensive, irregular and more billowing with age, eventually exposing extremely long lengths of naked, shaft-like, strongly erect trunks with deep rich reddish-brown stringing bark.

Tall, medium-sized to sometimes massive, monoecious evergreen trees, with a crown which is tapering at first, becoming more billowing with age. Their branch systems are numerous, slender, spreading, compressed and flattened, to form ultimate branchlets within a single plane, pendulous in some species (e.g. C. torulosa, C. funebris, C. cashmeriana) forming long whip-like tips, giving the trees a cascading appearance.

Tall, medium-sized to eventually often massive, dioecious, deciduous trees, with irregularly arrayed branches and a wide-domed crown, with branches densely clad with characteristic long-stalked, fan-like, winter-deciduous leaves. On female trees, seeds are drupe-like at maturity, within a fleshy outer covering and hanging pendulously in quantity, like yellow-green cherries. All leaves and fruits shed profusely in autumn.

Very long-lived, extremely tall and sometimes massive, monoecious evergreen trees, with a typically conical, tapering crown. The branch systems eventually often retreat to become high-set, revealing a long, ascending shaft-like trunk of pillar-like and virtually cathedrallian dimensions, the trunks are clad with reddish fibrous bark. The whole tree sheds copious amounts of dried, red–brown predominantly finely pinnate-leaved foliage, often including small marble-sized inconspicuous cones. The whole shed array is usually densely long persistent on the ground beneath.

Graceful evergreen trees or large shrubs, with linear acicular soft greyish-green leaves which long-persist or changing gradually to adult cupressoid foliage. Branches and branchlets are not flattened into a single plane. The adult foliage is without distinction between facial and lateral pairs. The seed cones are borne erect, often clustered and each of two pairs of scales which are woody when mature.

Dioecious evergreen trees of yew-like foliar habit. The leaves are more freely spaced, more perpendicularly inserted and more irregularly spreading than in Pectinopitys, often inserted near-perpendicularly and with many spreading more irregularly above or all around most major shoots, and hence only weakly and irregularly ranked. The leaves remain small, and much smaller than in Sundacarpus. The female ‘fruits’ when mature are pendulous on long stalks, and large and heavy.

Tall and often narrow evergreen trees of typically acutely tapering outline, densely furnished throughout with clumped masses of profuse linear, soft-textured foliage held in conspicuously radiating whorls, like the spokes of an umbrella.

Fairly tall, medium-sized to sometimes massive, monoecious, deciduous or sub-evergreen trees, with a typically conical, tapering crown when young, but becoming clean-trunked and starkly irregular-crowned with age. Their trunks are often flared widely towards the base and distinctively and often dramatically fluted.

Stately evergreen trees, often well furnished nearly to the ground, with straight, tapering trunks and tapering or rounded crowns of regular outline. They have an arched, drooping leader, and their numerous slender branch systems form wide and flattened sprays bearing (in most species) very numerous, small, distinctly flattened, oblong leaves and small, pendulous cones.

Monoecious evergreen trees, with a typically conical, tapering crown. The bright yellow–green scale-like foliage is moderately large, with scale leaves arrayed regimentally into often horizontally spreading and remarkably regularly mostly flattened fern-like sprays.

Medium to tall and sometimes massive evergreen trees, with a conical, tapering crown when young, eventually becoming more irregular with age but throughout life remaining typically well furnished, with flattened horizontally held foliage arrays. The foliage is predominantly of small scale leaves cladding horizontally held flattened fern-like foliar sprays, with only faint white stomatal markings beneath. The foliage is aromatic when lightly bruised, and often freely bears crops of small cigar-shaped pale-coloured female cones standing gregariously and regimentedly upright close to the basal parts of ultimate spreading foliar sprays.