The Juniper (Juniperus monosperma, Sarg.) is easily distinguished by its ashy bark in seasons where the berry is not there to tell the tale. This thin bark is stripped into its fibres and woven into cloth and mats by Indians. Girths of their saddles are woven of it. The berries also furnish food.
The tree grows to 5o feet high, with a strongly buttressed trunk 8 or io feet in girth. The limbs are short, with clustering grey-green foliage of the minute, scale-like sort. This is a tree of the mountain slope or the high plateau, ranging from Colorado to Texas, and west to Arizona, forming forests in southern Colorado and Utah. Fencing and fuel consume some wood each year.
The Rock Cedar (Juniperus sabiaoides, Nees.) is a consider able tree in the lowlands of the central counties of Texas, but dwindles in size as it ascends the mountains and arid regions to the west and south. This tree has distinctly quadrangular twigs by the paired, opposite arrangement of its strongly keeled leaves. The foliage mass is loose and irregular, with a dark blue-green cast.
Young shoots bear linear, free, spiny leaves inch long. The bark is reticulated by an intricate network of furrows leaving flat plates between. This juniper furnishes much fuel as well as a considerable supply of fence posts, railroad ties and telegraph poles in a region where wood is not plenty.
Red Juniper, Red Cedar (Juniperus Virginiana, Linn.)— Conical tree, compact when young, becoming loose and cylindrical or irregular when old; from a shrub to a tree too feet high and 5 fees trunk diameter; branches short, slender, ascending, becoming horizontal. Bark red, stringy, persistent; branches smooth. Wood soft, weak, close grained, red, fragrant. Buds minute, green. Leaves opposite, on old stems, 4-ranked; scale-like, blue green, closely appressed to twigs, which seem 4-angled; on new shoots, scattered, spiny, loose, awl shaped, to 4 inch long, pale yellow-green. Flowers in April, May; terminal on side twigs, dicecious, rarely moncecious; staminate of 4 to 6 scales, each bear ing several pollen sacs; pistillate of minute, paired, bluish, fleshy scales, bearing two ovules. Fruit a blue, glaucous berry, the size of a pea, ripening the first or second season and containing 1 to 4 seeds; flesh sweet, resinous. Preferred habitat, dry soil or peaty swamps. Distribution, east of the Rocky Mountains. Uses:
Wood used largely for pails, pencils, chests and closets, sills and interior finishing, railroad ties and fence posts.
It is unfortunate that, whereas the true cedars are all in the Old-World genus Cedrus, the American genera, Thuya, Libocedrus, Chamascyparis and Juniperus, each have one or more species to which the name is loosely applied. It would take a long while to unlearn the name "red cedar" for this familiar tree—to write with a juniper pencil; to put furs and woollens away in moth discouraging juniper chests. So hard it is to break a habit. The logical tning is to call this tree a juniper, as well as the other species of Juniperus, and so far reduce the confusion involved now every time the word cedar is mentioned.
This vagabond tree, familiar in abandoned farms and ragged fence rows of New England, is the same that grows from Nova Scotia to Georgia, and west to where the hills lift and the arid ridges become the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. A stunted tree covering the limestone plateaus of Tennessee, it is a towering pyramid of luxuriant green in the lower Mississippi Valley. Sea shores of the East and South, and sterile soil on foothills of Eastern mountains, all show these scattered trees, small and bushy, or tall and compact. The berries are borne in profusion and are distributed by birds.
The leaves are 2-ranked, spiny, channelled, lined with white on new shoots and on young trees. The older parts of twigs show closely appressed scale-like leaves. Both types are found on every tree. In winter a rusty brown comes over the dark blue green of the foliage mass, but spring revivifies it.
The trunks are columnar and corrugated; they bare them selves by shedding the stringy brown bark in longitudinal strips. In lower Pennsylvania this is a shade tree of considerable popular ity. It forms windbreaks in exposed situations, on the coast or inland, where most trees fail. The tree is planted profitably for posts and railroad ties in the Mississippi Valley States. Where trees can be had large enough for telegraph or telephone poles they command the highest prices, for the wood is one of the most durable. The Fabers have for generations maintained their own forests of this species in Germany to supply their pencil factories.