A PLEA FOR THE JUNIPER 
By Harvey Maitland Watts 
T HAT men tend to overlook the beauty 
that lies about them has never been so 
clearly exemplified as in the neglect on the 
part of American architects and landscape 
gardeners of the red cedar, Juniperus Firgin- 
iana, the familiar Juniper. A striking keynote 
of American landscape, a 
tree that has everything in 
its favor for treatment as 
an architectural adjunct as 
well as an unequaled focal 
point for landscape effects, 
the Juniper’s possibilities 
have long been ignored and 
its native virtues passed 
over in favor of foreign 
importations unsuited in 
every way to American life 
and habitations. 
We may travel to classic 
climes, and muse over the 
melancholy of decay, evoke 
the memories of past gran- 
deur amid the poetic 
glories of the cypresses of 
the Villa d’Este at T ivoli 
and feel in so doing that 
we have nothing in our landscape that equals 
these famous evergreens that have played so 
important a part in Italian outdoor art. But 
why should we slavishly try to copy condi¬ 
tions that are peculiar in climate, lie of the 
land and flora to Italy? Admit the unsur¬ 
passed beauty and harmony of the Renais¬ 
sance villas and the gardens that surround 
1 Of the three Junipers that one is apt to know in these latitudes 
and in New England [Juniperus Virginiana , Juniperus communis , 
Juniperus nana'j, the red cedar ( Juniperus Virginiana ) is the largest, 
most conspicuous and most generally diffused. So much is this the 
case that most people do not know any other Juniper than the red 
cedar, and for them it is the “ common Juniper,” since it is the only 
species they see growing freely about their homes, and it is certainly 
common enough for even those who know the countryside only from a 
car window to be familiar with its general aspect. Unfortunately, how¬ 
ever, the much less known and far less conspicuous species, somewhat 
rare in these parts, usually a very small, stiff, straggling, bushy ever¬ 
green which most people, if they notice it at all, take to be a “ young 
cedar,” is the “common Juniper” of science, the 'Juniperus com¬ 
munis. , and through this some confusion as to the name of the red cedar 
has arisen. As happens in so many cases, the name communis was 
applied to the (to us) unfamiliar Juniper because it is the common 
Juniper of northern Europe and Asia as well as of the northerly parts of 
the United States, so that when our very important tree, the red cedar, 
them, but let us not at the same time forget 
home conditions. If we shall but build the 
American estate, the fitting country house 
and its grounds, along lines suited to the 
genius of the American climate and the 
genius of our familiar landscape in working 
out the part the evergreen shall play in an 
American garden, we cannot leave out the 
Juniper. If an expression of the beauti¬ 
ful in color and form in trees is desired to 
meet special conditions of soil and climate 
and, at the same time, to be intimately 
bound up in the life and be eloquent of New 
World characteristics, the Juniper is — as 
was discovered, botanically, it had to take the New World designation 
of Virginiana. There can be no confusion as to the actual trees and 
shrubs themselves, however, since the red cedar is a tree, in the South 
sometimes one hundred feet high, and hence is the Juniper par excel¬ 
lence, in the way of size, form, habit and characteristics. Moreover 
the leafage of the two species is very distinct, the Juniperus communis 
being loose-sprayed, with rather long, awl-shaped leaves, and presenting 
an entirely different appearance from the red cedar. The third species, 
the Juniperus nana , the creeping Juniper, unknown here in the wilds, 
but familiar to those who have summer places in Maine and along the 
New England coast and in Canada, is also very distinct. It lies flat on 
the ground, the branches radiating from the center, giving it the effect, 
when it is in perfect form, of a superb embroidered and tufted mat of 
dark green. These Juniper mats sometimes are as much as twenty feet 
across. With its two sister species so modest, therefore, the red cedar is 
the Juniper without rivals in its own family. It is in fact if not in botani¬ 
cal name, therefore, the “ common Juniper,” though the adjective in its 
case, for those who know it, can never take on a depreciatory character. 
JUNIPERS ALONG A HILLSIDE LANE 
I2 4 
