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Look what followed me home today! 500 board feet of locally grown Cypress. 10/4 slabs! This will make a series of dining tables for our event space on the Ranch. 
About 100 years ago, the local ranchers planted rows of trees as windbreaks on their chicken, sheep, and cattle ranches in Western Marin and Sonoma counties. They planted, regretfully, a lot of eucalyptus, but they also planted many lovely rows of cypress trees.
Almost all the chicken ranches are gone, & most of the sheep, & the cow dairy business was thrashed by mega-dairies in the south, so many new land owners want the cypress rows trimmed back. To be fair, some of the cypress was dying, too. So there’s a reasonably good supply.
The eucalyptus isn’t much good for anything, but the cypress is lovely. It is creamy yellow, very tight, closed, straight grained, and it’s water, rot, and insect resistant. Not as resistant as old growth redwood, but that stuff is gone (save what’s left!).
