The Nature of Eureka

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Ashe’s Juniper

You’ve probably seen it and didn’t realize that you did. But it’s the time of year when if looking to identify trees, leaves are usually not a distraction. When it comes to native coniferous evergreens, we only have three species – shortleaf or yellow pine (Pinus echinata), red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) and Ashe’s juniper (Juniperus ashei) also known as mountain cedar, rock cedar, blueberry cedar and occasionally called Ozark white cedar. It is named after William Willard Ashe (1872-1932) a forester who collected specimens in the Ozarks.

Ashe’s juniper occurs along south and west-facing limestone bluffs and glades in the White River drainage in northern Arkansas, adjacent Missouri, a small area in northeast Oklahoma and the Arbuckle Mountains of southeast Oklahoma, as well as far southwest Arkansas. These are all disjunct populations separated by relatively long distances from Ashe’s juniper’s primary range in the Edwards Plateau in Texas where dense populations cover millions of acres. It also occurs in Coahuila, Mexico.

Ashe’s juniper is relatively easy to distinguish from red cedar. Ashe’s juniper trunks diverge at the base creating several boles rather than a single trunk as in our common red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), which of course is a juniper, not a cedar. Red cedar has a single vertical trunk.

Male and female trees are separate. In Ashe’s juniper the berry-like cones or fruits are glove-shaped, about the size of a wild blueberry and have a sweet flesh surrounding a single, or rarely two tear-dropped, seeds. Fruits of red cedar, are about half as large and contain two to three irregular, usually pitted seeds. The fruit of Ashe’s juniper, like red cedar, persist on the tree through the winter months. This time of year, the plump small “berries” on Ashe’s juniper have a sweet, delicious flavor. Mind you, while “edible,” they are the kind of wild “fruit” that you might eat in quantities of two or three, just as a taste treat.

If birds are plentiful during the winter months, the tasty “berries” will not stay on the tree for long. In 1936 immense flocks of robins are said to have cleaned the ripe fruits off of nearly all the Ashe’s junipers in Arkansas. Such scenes from the American landscape are relegated to history.