CONIFER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 89 
JUNIPERUS MONOSPERMA. 
Juniper. 
FRvIT small, globose or oblong; seeds 1 or rarely 2. Leaves acute or acuminate 
at the apex, usually eglandular. Branchlets slender. 
Juniperus monosperma. N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 181.— Coulter, Man. 
Juniperus occidentalis, Parlatore, De Candolle Prodr. Rocky Mt. Bot. 410.— Beissner, Handb. Nadelh. 129. — 
xvi. pt. ii. 489 (in part) (not Hooker) (1868). — Watson, Masters, Jour. R. Hort. Soc. xiv. 213. — Lemmon, JVest- 
King’s Rep. vi. 336. American Cone-Bearers, 80. 
Juniperus occidentalis, 8 monosperma, Engelmann, Juniperus Virginiana, Rothrock, Wheeler’s Rep. vi. 6 
Trans. St. Lowis Acad. iii. 590 (1877) ; Rothrock Whee- (not Linneus) (1878). 
ler’s Rep. vi. 263. — Veitch, Man. Conif. 289. — Rusby, Juniperus occidentalis, var. gymnocarpa, Lemmon, West- 
Bull. Torrey Bot. Club, ix. 79. —Sargent, Forest Trees ‘American Cone-Bearers, 80 (1895). 
A tree, occasionally forty or fifty feet tall, with a stout much-lobed and buttressed trunk 
sometimes three feet in diameter, short stout branches which form an open and very irregular head, 
and often with one or two branches near the ground much more developed than the others; or most 
frequently sending up numerous contorted stems which form a broad open unsightly bush from ten 
to twenty feet in height. The bark of the trunk is thin, ashy gray, divided into irregular narrow 
connected ridges which break up into long narrow persistent shreddy scales, disclosing by their 
separation the red-brown inner bark. The branchlets are slender and covered after the falling of the 
leaves with hight red-brown bark which splits freely into thin loose scales. The leaves are disposed 
in pairs or rarely in threes and are often slightly spreading at the apex; they are ovate, acute or 
occasionally acuminate, much thickened and rounded on the back, usually eglandular but occasionally 
furnished with rather obscure dorsal glands, gray-green, and rather less than an eighth of an inch in 
length, and turn a bright red-brown before they fall; those on vigorous shoots and on younger plants 
are ovate, acute, tipped with long rigid points, thin, conspicuously glandular on the back, and often 
half an inch in length. The staminate flower consists of from eight to twelve stamens with broadly 
ovate rounded connectives or anther-scales slightly erose on the margins. The fruit is globose or 
oblong, from an eighth to a quarter of an inch long, and dark blue or occasionally copper-colored, 
with a thick firm epidermis covered by a conspicuous glaucous bloom, thin sweetish resinous flesh from 
which on some individuals the seed protrudes, and with one or rarely with two or three seeds. The seed 
1S broadly ovate, often four-angled, with numerous slender grooves between the ridges, light chestnut- 
brown, lustrous at the somewhat obtuse apex, and marked below with the large pale two-lobed hilum ; 
it has a comparatively thin and brittle outer wall, a pale brown membranaceous inner seed-coat, and an 
embryo with two cotyledons. 
Juniperus monosperma is distributed from the divide between the Platte and Arkansas Rivers at 
the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where, accompanied by the Nut Pine and the 
Yellow Pine, it clothes with an open stunted forest arid slopes between 5,500 and 7,000 feet above 
the sea-level, southward along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to’ the mountain ranges of western 
Texas; it is common and the prevailing Juniper over the whole of the Colorado plateau, where in 
southern Colorado and Utah and in northern and central New Mexico and Arizona it often covers, 
usually with the Nut Pine or occasionally alone, great areas of rolling hills from six to seven thousand 
feet above the sea-level, forming a forest belt just above the desert and below the belt in which the 
Yellow Pine is the predominating tree,’ and probably reaching its largest size in northern Arizona ; it 
! Merriam, North American Fauna, No. 3, 120. 
