Nature Notes: The ‘Inescapable’ Juniper

Following the end of World War II there was a big building boom across the country as our servicemen came back from the European and Pacific theaters to resume the American way of life that they missed during four years of nonstop fighting against the Germans and Japanese.

There was not only a building boom, but the nursery business expanded exponentially as all of those new houses, such as the hundreds built UpIsland in Levittown in a matter of a few years, needed lawns, flowers, shrubs, and trees to highlight the tiny tracts upon which the new houses were constructed.

One of the most widely planted low shrubs cultivated at the time were evergreens of the genus Juniperus. These junipers stayed green and shiny all year around, needed very little care, and provided effective low hedges to hide the concrete foundations and other not so pretty exterior features. They went by exotic names like Korean juniper, Chinese juniper, Persian juniper, and the like, notwithstanding the fact that many of the varieties or “cultivars” as they are popularly referred to in the landscaping business, were developed right here in America.

When Long Island was first settled, there were two species of junipers present — one quite rare and a plant more of grasslands than of forests, the common juniper; the other very common and one of the most abundant trees around at the time, the eastern red cedar. The “common” of the former derived from the botanical literature. Linnaeus had named it in the mid-1700s, Juniperus communis, because it was found throughout the northern hemisphere, in Europe, Asia, and North America. The “cedar” of the latter is a misnomer as true cedars grow in the Near East and northern Africa and belong to the genus Cedrus.

In Eurasia, the common juniper is a tree; in most of North America it is a low spreading shrub. Here on Long Island it is quite rare and, more often than not, found in open areas, such as old fields and maritime grasslands. Victoria Bustamante, a local botanist, has found two thus far in Montauk, one near Money Pond on the north side of the point, and a second, just a week ago, on the north side of a low ocean dune near the I.G.A. in Montauk.

I grew up on the North Fork and don’t remember seeing any growing there in the wild. In 42 years of my South Fork existence I know of only four: one on the Bell Estate old field in Amagansett, which I haven’t seenfor several years now, a second on Route 114 poking out from the woods north of Swamp Road, and two in the Soak Hides Nature Preserve east of Springy Banks Road at the very bottom of Three Mile Harbor. These last two are in a mature hardwood forest with trees averaging nearly a foot in diameter and reaching 55 to 65 feet in height.

On Sunday I visited the site, having been stimulated by Victoria’s Montauk find. I was pleased to find both common cedars intact and measured their size accordingly. The small one was about 25 feet in diameter, the large one was 65 feet wide along one axis, 50 feet wide along a second axis perpendicular to the first. In other words the canopy of the second, reaching barely a foot or more above the ground, occupies about 2,000 square feet. Can you think of a local tree that has such a spreading canopy? I can’t. Interestingly, while deer often feed on the lower branches of the red cedar, thereby sculpting it along highways such as the Sunrise in plain view of passing autos, deer don’t seem to bother with either of the two in the nature preserve.

While the one on Route 114 is not doing well and seems to be dying back after continually being cut along its leading edge by periodic shoulder mowing, the two in the nature preserve are dark green throughout and in excellent condition. Throughout the 30 years I have known them, I have yet to find any cedar berries on them. The common cedar is dioecious, like the American holly and sassafras, meaning male and female parts don’t occur on the same individual. The two specimens could quite possibly be males.

Michael Dirr, a world famous landscape gardener and onetime professor at Duke University, wrote one of the definitive treaties on woody plants. While in the mountains of Switzerland he came upon a common juniper and wrote, “Two things in life are inescapable, taxes and J. communis.” 

Not too long ago, another arborist, Thomas S. Elias, wrote in his book “The Complete Trees of North America” that the common juniper was the only American tree to also occur in both Europe and Asia. Very few plants can claim such a distinction. Phragmites australis, which grows profusely a mere 40 feet away from the larger of the two common cedars, grows all over the world, but was apparently brought to America by humans.

In the latest plant manuals, the common juniper is listed as a variety of the species, appropriately named J. communis var. depressa. But there is also a hybrid species, J. horizontalis, that is listed in Mitchell and Tucker’s “Revised Checklist of New York State Plants,” published in 1997 by the New York State Museum in Albany. It is endangered.

Hmmm. I better go back and take another look.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].