The Junipers 



dioecious, rarely monoecious; staminate of 4 to 6 scales, each bear- 

 ing several pollen sacs; pistillate of minute, paired, bluish, fleshy 

 scales, bearing two ovules. Fruit a blue, glaucous berry, the size 

 of a pea, ripening the first or second season and containing i to 4 

 seeds; flesh sweet, resinous. Preferred habitat, dry soil or peaty 

 swamps. Distribution, east of the Rocky Mountains. Uses: 

 Wood used largely for pails, pencils, chests and closets, sills and 

 interior finishing, railroad ties and fence posts. 



It is unfortunate that, whereas the true cedars are all in the 

 Old-World genus Cedrus, the American genera. Thuya, Libocedrus, 

 Chamaecyparis and Juniperus, each have one or more species to 

 which the name is loosely applied. It would take a long while 

 to uiiiearn the name "red cedar" for this familiar tree — to write 

 with a juniper pencil; to put furs and woollens away in moth- 

 discouraging juniper chests. So hard it is to break a habit. The 

 logical tning is to call this tree a juniper, as well as the other 

 species of Juniperus, and so far reduce the confusion involved now 

 every time the word cedar is mentioned. 



This vagabond tree, familiar in abandoned farms and ragged 

 fence rows of New England, is the same that grows from Nova 

 Scotia to Georgia, and west to where the hills lift and the arid ridges 

 become the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. A stunted tree 

 covering the limestone plateaus of Tennessee, it is a towering 

 pyramid of luxuriant green in the lower Mississippi Valley. Sea- 

 shores of the East and South, and sterile soil on foothills of 

 Eastern mountains, all show these scattered trees, small and 

 bushy, or tall and compact. The berries are borne in profusion 

 and are distributed by birds. 



The leaves are 2-ranked, spiny, channelled, lined with white 

 on new shoots and on young trees. The older parts of twigs 

 show closely appressed scale-like leaves. Both types are found 

 on every tree. In winter a rusty brown comes over the dark blue- 

 green of the foliage mass, but spring revivifies it. 



The trunks are columnar and corrugated; they bare them- 

 selves by shedding the stringy brown bark in longitudinal strips. 

 In lower Pennsylvania this is a shade tree of considerable popular- 

 ity. It forms windbreaks in exposed situations, on the coast or 

 inland, where most trees fail. The tree is planted profitably for 

 posts and railroad ties in the Mississippi Valley States. Where 

 trees can be had large enough for telegraph or telephone poles 



IC9 



