Western Red Cedar

Western Red Cedar is a large Pacific Northwest conifer native to the coastal rainforests of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. Its exceptional properties are not the result of any manufacturing process: they come entirely from the tree’s biology. The heartwood is loaded with natural oils called thujaplicins that give it an innate resistance to rot, decay, fungi, and insects that no synthetic material can truly replicate.

These oils (produced as the tree grows over decades) permeate every cell of the heartwood, creating a material that is inherently stable, dimensionally consistent, and extraordinarily durable. It is one of the very few building materials where the natural version outperforms the treated version. This is why Western Red Cedar has been the benchmark roofing and siding species across North America for well over a century, and why it remains the most specified cedar product in the USA today.

At Direct Cedar Supplies, we source Western Red Cedar from sustainably managed forests in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley and mill it to CSSB-certified standards. Whether you need R&R siding shingles, roofing perfections, handsplit shakes, or tapersawn shakes — every piece is graded, measured, and selected before it leaves the mill.