Suddenly, Beijing's bleak, main thoroughfares are lined with cypresses and new pavements.

ECONOMIST: Get ready for an enormous show of triumphalism

As the fourth man kneels, awaiting his fate, tall dark cypresses, white city walls and the Tuscan hills behind him recede into the distance.

ECONOMIST: A rare chance to see the works of a 15th-century master

Builders have been uprooting and moving big trees since at least the 1920s, when William Randolph Hearst had cypresses trucked in from Paso Robles, Calif.

WSJ: Moving an Octogenarian Is Tough, Especially One That Put Down Roots

Slowly, the slaves, with their belongings wrapped in bundles or carried in old carpetbags, walked up to the main house and distributed themselves out front under the cypresses.

NPR: E.L. Doctorow on Sherman and 'The March'

Inside the courtyard, bluestone pavers and grass crisscross on the ground and Italian cypresses, olive trees, rosemary bushes and boxwoods serve as the backdrop to lilies, jasmine, hydrangeas and delphiniums.

WSJ: Full Enclosure - WSJ Mansion

Walls of cypresses separated each house from the next.

NEWYORKER: Waiting

At the northern end of the Forbidden City is the Imperial Garden, a classical Chinese garden with 7, 000 sq metres of fine landscaping, including rockeries, walkways, pavilions and ancient - carbuncular and deformed - cypresses.

BBC: Beijing's once Forbidden City

Hundred-year-old farmhouses, red roofs, and such tall cypresses!

NEWYORKER: Heirs