TWO JUNIPERS OF THE SOUTHWEST. 89 



activity, which is again quieted by the advent of winter. This 

 process is not always regular, and determination of age is com- 

 plicated by the formation of sometimes but one, sometimes three 

 or possibly even more, annual rings per year. The age of a young 

 grow^th of both species, coming up on a cut-over area, and five to 

 twelve feet high, was thus found to be approximately twenty 

 years. During the season of 1905, followdng heavy snows and 

 rains, a remarkably fine growth was made. The mean of a con- 

 siderable number of measurements was not far from fourteen 

 inches. A certain stump of alligator juniper upon a ridge, thirty 

 inches in diameter, was found to have been about five hundred and 

 forty years in the making. Another of the same species and size, 

 that had grown on bottom-land, was approximately three hundred 

 and seventy-five years old. A conservative estimate of the age 

 of trees double this diameter — stumps of many such are found, 

 but are very hard to count — would be seven hundred to eight 

 hundred years. It is not at all improbable that the tree shown in 

 the picture is one thousand years old. In temperate regions at 

 least, the alligator juniper should perhaps be given second place 

 to the famous California sequoia. The writer should be glad to 

 hear of any evidence to the contrary. It means that these trees 

 struck root in the middle ages, that they reared their fragrant 

 crow^ns to the ozone of the Cordilleran breeze before civilized man 

 dreamed of America. 



The junipers are dioecious, /. c. staminate and pistillate flowers 

 are on separate trees. An occasional staminate tree was found 

 that bore a berry or two, thus proving that the tree is sometimes 

 monoecious. Its berries are small cones covered with juicy pulp. 

 It is thus a conifer. On the berries of the alligator juniper are 

 seen protuberances like those on a large green caterpillar. They 

 appear to be the covered tips of the cone-scales. The berries of 

 the juniper take tw^o years to mature. 



The globular berries of the alligator juniper run very large, 

 viz., from the size of an ordinary pea to five-eighths of an inch 

 in diameter. One tree was seen that bore fruit as much as three- 

 fourths of an inch in diameter. It contained no good seeds, how- 

 ever, and was clearly abnormal. The fibrous flesh is dry and 



