Softwoods and coniferous trees are the two names that stand in for conifers with no change in meaning at all. Gymnosperm is the third name you will run into, and it covers a wider group that holds the conifers plus a few odd relatives. Every entry on the list of conifer other names does one of two jobs. It either names the wood on the rack or names the plant in the ground.
You can see that split in one afternoon. Walk into a lumberyard and the pine, fir and spruce stacked by the door are sold as softwood boards, priced by the foot and graded for knots. Open a field guide to those same trees and they sit under coniferous trees instead, sorted by cone and needle. The softwood trees on the rack and the coniferous trees in the book are the same plants. Only the trade doing the naming has changed.
Each name is doing a different job. Softwood is a timber term, and it sorts lumber into two big buckets for mills and buyers. It is not a hardness test you can run with a thumbnail. Coniferous is the plain adjective, built from the Latin for cone bearing, so it points at the way the tree carries its seeds. Gymnosperm sits a level above both of those. It covers seed plants that leave their seeds bare instead of packing them inside fruit.
That top level is wider than most people expect. Forest and colleagues counted 638 conifer species in 2018. They sit inside a gymnosperm group of about 1,090 species, and the rest of it is cycads, gnetophytes and Ginkgo. So conifers are the bulk of the gymnosperms, but never the whole of them. Call a pine a gymnosperm and you are right. Call every gymnosperm a conifer and you have swept up the cycads by mistake.
The count runs the other way in the timber trade. You will find that native North American trees sort into 15 conifer genera and 63 species. The hardwood side of the same list runs to 58 genera and 128 species. Conifers are the shorter list by a wide margin, and they still fill most of the racks you walk past at the lumberyard. Few kinds of tree, enormous reach.
Past those three main words, conifer other names keep going into narrower corners. Needle-leaved trees describes the look, and it works well in plain writing for kids or beginners. Pinophyta is the formal division name. You will meet it in botany texts and keys, not in talk at the yard. Then come the family names, and three of them carry nearly every conifer you will meet. Pinaceae holds the pines, firs and spruces. The cypresses, junipers and redwoods are Cupressaceae, while the yews sit alone in Taxaceae. None of that shifts the coniferous trees meaning you started with. Each label just aims at a smaller slice of the same trees.
One swap fails every time, so watch for it. Evergreen is not another word for conifer. Larch, tamarack, dawn redwood and bald cypress all drop every needle in fall and stand bare through winter. They still make cones, and they are still conifers. That mix-up is the most common error on pages about these trees, and the full evergreen comparison belongs in the main article rather than here.
Pick your word by the job in front of you. Say softwood when you are buying lumber or talking to a mill, because that is the word on the invoice. Say conifer or coniferous when you are describing a living tree. Save gymnosperm for the moment you need to place conifers next to their odd cousins. And skip evergreen unless you have checked that the tree keeps its needles all year.
Read the full article: Conifers: Types, Traits, and Hard Numbers
