88 SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. CONIFER Z. 
ascends to elevations of nearly ten thousand feet above the sea, standing like a sentinel with its massive 
stem and far-spreading branches impervious to the fiercest winter gales ; ' 
in the company of Pinus 
Murrayana and Pinus albicaulis 1t grows tall and symmetrical on rich moraine soil bordering alpine 
meadows ; and in Bear Valley on the northern slope of the San Bernardino Mountains, between six 
and seven thousand feet above the sea-level, it forms a nearly pure forest of considerable extent.’ 
The wood of Juniperus occidentalis is light, soft, very close-grained, and exceedingly durable in 
contact with the soil; it is light red or brown, with thick nearly white sapwood, and contains thin 
inconspicuous bands of small summer-cells and numerous very obscure medullary rays. 
gravity of the absolutely dry wood is 0.5765, a cubic foot weighing 35.93 pounds. 
fencing and fuel. 
The specific 
It is used for 
The fruit is gathered and eaten by the Indians of California.* 
Juniperus occidentalis was discovered in 1806 by Lewis and Clark on the mountains of the basin 
of the Columbia River.® 
1 Mr. John Muir (The Mountains of California, 204, f.) points out 
the fact that Juniperus occidentalis has such a hold on the ground 
and offers such resistance to the elements that “it dies standing, 
and wastes insensibly out of existence like granite, the wind exert- 
ing as little control over it alive or dead as it does over a glacier 
boulder.” 
2 §. B. Parish, Zod, iv. 353. 
8 Palmer, Am. Nat. xii. 594. 
4 Juniperus occidentalis grows very slowly, especially on exposed 
rocky slopes, and Muir (J. c.) believes that some of the old speci- 
mens on the Sierra Nevada are over two thousand years of age. 
The log specimen in the Jesup Collection of North American 
Woods in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, is 
twenty-three inches in diameter inside the bark, and shows only one 
hundred and thirteen layers of annual growth, the tree from which 
it was cut having, after the first forty years, increased rapidly and 
regularly, many annual layers being an eighth of an inch thick. 
On this specimen the sapwood is seven and a quarter inches in 
thickness with eighty-six layers of annual growth. 
5 In Coues’s edition of the Journal of Lewis and Clark no mention 
is made of this Juniper, but it was described by Pursh from speci- 
mens brought back by this expedition. 
EXPLANATION OF THE PLATE. 
Pruate DXXI. JUNIPERUS OCCIDENTALIS. 
A seed, enlarged. 
WOON OA FP wD 
= 
=) 
. An embryo, enlarged. 
a 
an 
. End of a leaf, enlarged. 
A flowering branch of the staminate tree, natural size. 
. A staminate flower, enlarged. 
. A stamen, front view, enlarged. 
A flowering branch of the pistillate tree, natural size. 
. A pistillate flower, enlarged. 
A fruiting branch, natural size. 
. A fruit with part of the flesh removed, enlarged. 
. Vertical section of a seed, enlarged. 
. End of a branchlet, enlarged. 
