The wood and its berries may be burnt in sick-rooms to purify the air and refresh the patient. Country people believed that burning sprays of Juniper kept away witches, and the smoke was supposed to drive away serpents, as well as to destroy any germs of plague or other infectious disease.
In Scotland the smoke from a Juniper fire is used for curing hams.
In Lapland the peasants make ropes from the Juniper bark, and they tell you that if a bit of Juniper wood is lighted and then carefully covered with ashes it will keep alight for a whole year.
The trunk of the Juniper tree is too small and slight to be very useful as timber; but good walking-sticks are often made from the branches and young stems.
PLATE XX
THE LARCH
“When rosy plumelets tuft the larch.”
—Tennyson.
The Larch (1) was brought to Britain in the seventeenth century from its home on the high mountains of Germany, Austria, and Italy. It has taken kindly to our cheerless climate, and now covers acres of what was once barren moorland.
A few years after Larches are planted the long flexible branches of the young trees meet and form a thicket into which little light or air can enter, and the weeds and heather growing round the tree roots are stifled. Each winter the Larch sheds on the bare ground millions of its tiny needle-leaves, which enrich the soil.
After the young trees have grown to a certain height the forester thins the plantation; he cuts down a number of the young trees, so that those which remain may have more room to grow, and he removes all the withered branches near the ground. This allows the sunshine to reach the soil, and soon after a crop of soft, fine grass is seen carpeting the ground. Sheep and cattle can now be pastured where a short time before there grew nothing but heather and weeds.