CONIFER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 81 
JUNIPERUS UTAHENSIS. 
Juniper. 
Fruit usually globose; seeds solitary or rarely in pairs. Leaves ternate or binate, 
acute or acuminate, eglandular. Branchlets slender. 
Juniperus Utahensis, Lemmon, ep. California State vi. 264; Brewer & Watson Bot. Cal. ii. 113. — Sargent, 
Lourd Lorestry, iii. 183, t. 28, £. 2 (Cone-Bearers of Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U.S. ix. 180. 
Culifornia) (1890). Juniperus occidentalis, Watson, King’s Rep. v. 336 (in 
Juniperus Californica, var. Utahensis, Engelmann, Trans. part) (not Hooker) (1871); Pl. Wheeler, 18. 
St. Louis Acad. iii. 588 (1877) ; Rothrock Wheeler's Rep. Juniperus occidentalis, var. Utahensis, Veitch, Man. 
Conif. 289 (1881). 
A bushy tree, rarely exceeding twenty feet in height, with a short usually eccentric trunk 
sometimes two feet in diameter, and generally divided near the ground by irregular deep fissures into 
broad rounded ridges, and with many erect contorted branches which form a broad open head ; or more 
often with numerous stems springing from the ground and frequently not more than eight or ten feet 
in height. The bark of the trunk is about a quarter of an inch in thickness, ashy gray or sometimes 
nearly white, and broken into long thin persistent scales. The branchlets are slender and light yellow- 
green, and after the falling of the leaves are covered with thin light red-brown scaly bark. The leaves 
are opposite or occasionally in threes, closely appressed, rounded and eglandular on the back, acute or 
often acuminate, slightly toothed on the margins, light yellow-green, and rather less than an eighth of 
an inch long, and, dying and turning brown on the branches, are persistent for many years ; on young 
shoots they are often elongated and long-pointed, passing gradually into the acerose leaves of more 
vigorous shoots and of seedling plants. The staminate flower is composed of from eighteen to twenty- 
four opposite or ternate stamens, with rhomboidal connectives or anther-scales. The scales of the 
pistillate flower are acute, spreading, and often in pairs. The fruit, which ripens during the autumn of 
the second season, is subglobose or oblong, marked by the more or less prominent tips of the flower- 
scales, reddish brown, with a thick firm epidermis closely investing the thin dry fibrous sweet flesh, and 
covered with a glaucous bloom which often gives it, especially during its first season, a bluish 
appearance; it is from one eighth to one quarter of an inch long, and contains one or rarely two 
seeds. The seed is ovate, acute, conspicuously and acutely angled, marked nearly to the apex by the 
two-lobed pale hilum, and from one sixteenth to one eighth of an inch long, with a hard bony outer 
wall, a membranaceous pale brown inner coat; the embryo has from four to six cotyledons. 
Juniperus Utahensis is found only in the desert region between the Rocky Mountains and the 
Sierra Nevada, where it is the most abundant and generally distributed tree, ranging from the western 
foothills of the Wasatch Mountains in eastern Utah to southeastern California, northern Arizona, and 
western Colorado.! In central Nevada it is the only tree which descends into the valleys, where it is 
often abundant and forms open stunted forests at elevations of about five thousand feet above the 
sea-level; on the arid slopes of the mountains of this region it is still more common and of larger 
size, forming with the Nut Pine the forest growth at elevations up to eight thousand feet.? It is 
common on the mountain ranges of southern Nevada, clothing with the Nut Pine many of their 
summits, and occurs, although less abundantly, on those of southeastern California ; it covers with a 
continuous nearly pure forest twenty miles wide the Juniper Mountains, a rolling plateau six or seven 
1 Juniperus Utahensis is the common Juniper on the high plateaus 2 Sargent, Am. Jour. Sct. ser. 3, xvii. 418 (The Forests of Central 
of western Colorado, and the valley of Grand River. Nevada). 
