Often planted for the decoration of squares and cemeteries in the cities and towns in the neighborhood of the coast from Florida to western Louisiana, and now often naturalized beyond the limits of its natural range on the Gulf coast; occasionally cultivated in the temperate countries of Europe, and in cultivation the most beautiful of the Junipers.
12. [Juniperus scopulorum] Sarg. Red Cedar.
Leaves usually opposite, closely appressed, acute or acuminate, generally marked on the back by obscure elongated glands, dark green, or often pale and very glaucous. Flowers: male with about 6 stamens, their connectives rounded and entire, bearing 4 or 5 anther-sacs: scales of the female flower spreading, acute or acuminate, and obliterated from the mature fruit. Fruit ripening at the end of the second season, nearly globose, ¼′—⅓′ in diameter, bright blue, with a thin skin covered with a glaucous bloom, sweet resinous flesh, and 1 or usually 2 seeds; seeds acute, prominently grooved and angled, about 3/16′ long, with a thick bony outer coat and a small 2-lobed hilum.
A tree, 30°—40° high, with a short stout trunk sometimes 3° in diameter, often divided near the ground into a number of stout spreading stems, thick spreading and ascending branches covered with scaly bark, forming an irregular round-topped head, and slender 4-angled branchlets becoming at the end of three or four years terete and clothed with smooth pale bark separating later into thin scales. Bark dark reddish brown or gray tinged with red, divided-by shallow fissures into narrow flat connected ridges broken on the surface into persistent shredded scales.
Distribution. Scattered often singly over dry rocky ridges, usually at altitudes of 5000° or 6000° but occasionally ascending in Colorado to 9000° above the sea, from the eastern foothill region of the Rocky Mountains from Alberta to the Black Hills of South Dakota, the valley of the Niobrara River, Sheridan County, northwestern Nebraska (J. M. Bates) and to western Texas and eastern and northern New Mexico, and westward to eastern Oregon, Nevada, and northern Arizona; descending to the sea-level in Washington on the shores of the northern part of Puget Sound and on the islands and mainland about the Gulf of Georgia, British Columbia.
II. TAXACEÆ.
Slightly resinous trees and shrubs, producing when cut vigorous stump shoots, with fissured or scaly bark, light-colored durable close-grained wood, slender branchlets, linear-lanceolate entire rigid acuminate spirally disposed leaves, usually appearing 2-ranked by a twist in their short compressed petioles and persistent for many years, and small ovoid acute buds. Flowers opening in early spring from buds formed the previous autumn, diœcious or monœcious, axillary and solitary, surrounded by the persistent decussate scales of the buds, the male composed of numerous filaments united into a column, each filament surmounted by several more or less united pendant pollen-cells; the female of a single erect ovule, becoming at maturity a seed with a hard bony shell, raised upon or more or less surrounded by the enlarged and fleshy aril-like disk of the flower; embryo axile, in fleshy ruminate or uniform albumen; cotyledons 2, shorter than the superior radicle. Of the ten genera widely distributed over the two hemispheres, two occur in North America.
CONSPECTUS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN GENERA.
Filaments dilated into 4 pollen-sacs united into a half ring; seeds drupe-like, green or purple, ripening at the end of the second season; albumen ruminate.1. [Torreya.] Filaments dilated into a globose head of 4—8 connate pollen-sacs; seeds berry-like, scarlet, ripening at the end of the first season; albumen uniform.2. [Taxus.]