CONIFEROUS FORESTS 347 



Alleghanies, in what might be called the interior hardwood region, and 

 forms nearly pure stands, commonly called cedar glades, in Middle 

 Tennessee and northern Alabama. (Of the numerous places named 

 Lebanon in the United States it is altogether probable that those in 

 Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Florida, if not most of the 

 others, were named from the presence of cedar trees, although our cedar 

 bears little resemblance to Cedrus Libani, the classical cedar of 

 Lebanon.) 



The soil in which this tree grows is usually dry, and nearly always 

 thin or rocky, but it varies greatly in chemical composition. In Ala- 

 bama, Tennessee and some other parts of the country the cedar is 

 believed to prefer calcareous soils, but this does not seem to be true 

 throughout its range, for it grows in many places where no lime can be 

 detected without a careful chemical analysis. 



This species is very sensitive to fire, and the places frequented by it, 

 such as pastures, fence-rows, edges of marshes, dunes, rocks, bluffs, 

 hammocks, etc., are all pretty well protected from fire in one way or 

 another. In fact exemption from fire seems to be the only significant 

 character that its diverse habitats have in common, from which we may 

 conclude that that governs its local distribution more than anything 

 else. 13 



The wood of the cedar is very durable, but now used mostly for 

 pencils, in which this quality is not taken advantage of. Eepresentatives 

 of the pencil-makers have scoured the country pretty thoroughly for it, 

 and few large straight-grained trees have escaped them, even in small 

 groves in the most out-of-the-way places in the South. Although it is 

 not separated from some other species in the census returns, the cedar 

 cut in 1909 in Tennessee (8,927,000 feet), Missouri (2,984,000 feet) 

 and Alabama (2,869,000 feet) must be all or nearly all of this species. 



The Southern White Cedar or "Juniper" {Chamcecyparis thyoides) 

 is the only conifer that grows both in the glaciated region and in the 

 coastal plain and nowhere else. It ranges from New Hampshire to 

 Mississippi, but is not known more than 200 miles inland, or southeast 

 of a straight line drawn from Charleston to Apalachicola (which ex- 

 cludes most of Florida) ; and there are several large gaps in its range. 

 It usually grows in dense colonies of several hundred trees or more, 

 much like the spruces farther north. 



It is strictly a swamp tree, growing naturally only in permanently 

 saturated soil, or peat. The water of these swamps is exceptionally free 

 from mud, lime (perhaps also sulphur) and other mineral substances, 

 but is usually colored dark brown by vegetable matter. Cities as far 



13 This was discussed at some length in Torreya, 12: 145-154, July, 1912. 

 The most complete treatise on red cedar is Bulletin 31 of the Division of For- 

 estry of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, by Dr. Charles Mohr, 1901. 



