It was a clear and beautiful June morning when I joined a team led by Neil Pederson, Senior Ecologist at Harvard Forest to venture out into a swamp forest in Westminster, Massachusetts. Our mission was to core old-growth Atlantic white cedar that grows in these forests. According to the U.S. Forest Service, the Atlantic white cedar is one of only six species in this genus. Only three of the six are native to the continent, and two of them are West Coast species. This leaves Atlantic white cedar as the only representative in the East, where it occurs in a narrow band along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida.