Eastern Red Cedar

The toughest native evergreen in the East, and the only home of the emerald juniper hairstreak butterfly. It feeds waxwings all winter and shelters birds in the worst weather - but it is also the alternate host for cedar-apple rust, and it seeds into prairie relentlessly, so it needs siting with thought.

Full sun and any drained soil, and it is essentially self-sufficient after the first year. The work is all in the siting: distance from fruit trees, distance from the house in fire country, and a plan for the seedlings birds will plant.

Red cedar wants full sun and drainage, and it is genuinely indifferent to everything else — poor soil, alkaline soil, clay, sand, drought, wind, road salt, and coastal exposure. It is hardy from zone 3 into zone 9. Water it through the first growing season, then leave it alone. It will not tolerate deep shade or ground that stays saturated, and those are close to the only ways to fail with it.

The decisions are about placement. First, distance from rose-family fruit: this tree hosts the overwintering stage of cedar-apple, cedar-hawthorn, and cedar-quince rust, and the more separation you can put between it and an orchard, the less trouble everyone has. Second, fire: resinous foliage and dead interior twigs make a mature red cedar highly flammable, so keep it well outside the defensible space around buildings in any fire-prone region. Third, seedlings: birds spread it prolifically, so if there is unmown ground, pasture, or a remnant prairie nearby, plan on pulling volunteers once a year while they are small.

For a windbreak or screen, space plants 8 to 15 feet apart in a staggered double row and leave the lower branches on. For a specimen, give a plant 15 to 25 feet and let it keep its narrow pyramidal shape. If you want the blue winter cones, you need a female plant — buy a named selection or one already fruiting.

Effectively none. No feeding, no watering once established, no routine pruning. The two jobs worth doing are picking bagworm bags off in winter and cutting out the rust galls before spring rain.

An established red cedar needs nothing: no fertilizer, no water, no staking, no annual care. That is most of its appeal. What little attention it repays is seasonal and specific.

Bagworms are the one pest that genuinely kills junipers, because a conifer stripped of foliage cannot releaf the way a broadleaf tree can. Their bags are camouflaged with the tree's own foliage and are easy to mistake for cones. Check the outer twigs through summer, and pick off every bag between fall and early spring — hand-picking is a complete control if you actually do it.

Rust galls are the neighborly job. Hard brown galls hang on the twigs all winter and erupt into orange spore horns with the first warm spring rain. They barely bother the cedar; they are what infects the apples downwind. Cutting them out in January or February, before they swell, takes an hour and matters.

Pruning otherwise is minimal, and there is one rule that catches people out: red cedar will not resprout from bare brown wood. Shear only into green growth, only in dry weather, and never try to reduce an overgrown plant by cutting back hard — the hole you make is permanent. On narrow columnar forms, tie the leaders loosely before heavy snow, which otherwise splays them open for good.

No kitchen crop. The blue cones are bird food and are not the culinary juniper berry of gin, and the famous aromatic heartwood is a timber harvest measured in decades, not seasons.

There is nothing here to pick, and one confusion worth settling firmly. The frosted blue berry-like cones are not the culinary juniper berry of gin, sauerkraut, and game marinades — that is common juniper, Juniperus communis, a different species. Red cedar cones are resinous and are not recommended as a substitute, juniper preparations are avoided in pregnancy, and the sensible way to think of this crop is as bird food, which is what it is for.

The tree's real product is its heartwood: rich red-purple, fine-grained, extremely rot-resistant, and intensely fragrant. This is the aromatic cedar of chests, closet linings, and fence posts. One honest note on the folklore — the oils in fresh aromatic cedar can kill very small clothes-moth larvae, but a cedar chest does not repel moths or protect clothing already infested, and the scent fades as the wood ages. Store clean clothes, and treat the fragrance as a pleasure rather than a pesticide.

Cutting a red cedar for lumber is a decades-long proposition on a tree that grows slowly, so for a gardener this is a tree you plant for the birds, the wind, and the winter green — not for anything you carry indoors.

Nothing to preserve. Seed must be cleaned and given one to two winters outdoors, and the heartwood's value in storage is its rot resistance and fragrance, not any protection it gives your clothes.

Red cedar produces no crop to store. If you are keeping seed, clean the pulp off ripe cones promptly, since the flesh and its resins hold germination back, then sow outdoors in a protected bed in fall and be patient. This is one of the slower native seeds: it carries both a hard coat and internal dormancy, and a sowing routinely comes up unevenly over one to two winters. In nature, passage through a bird solves both problems at once, which is why the seedlings appear under perches rather than under the parent tree.

The heartwood is what red cedar is known for storing, in every sense: it is one of the most rot-resistant woods in North America, which made it the standard American fence post for generations, and its oils give it the fragrance of cedar chests and closet linings. Kept dry, that wood lasts more or less indefinitely. Kept in the ground, an untreated red cedar post outlives most treated ones. Note the caveat in the Harvest section on what a cedar chest does and does not do for wool.

Buy a plant - ideally a named female selection if you want the blue cones. Seed is slow and erratic over one to two winters, and cuttings root but need patience and a cold frame.

For almost every purpose, buy a nursery plant. Red cedar transplants easily at any size, establishes fast, and the named selections give you a predictable shape and, importantly, a known sex — a seedling has an even chance of being male and never producing a single blue cone.

From seed, collect ripe cones in fall, clean off the waxy pulp, and sow in an outdoor bed. Expect germination spread over one or two winters and a fair number that never come up at all; nurseries improve on this with acid or warm-then-cold treatments, but for a home grower it is simply a long wait. It is also, of course, exactly what happens by itself along every fence line, so if you want more red cedars in a rural landscape you generally need only stop mowing.

Cuttings work and are how cultivars are kept true: take firm current-season tips in late fall or winter, strip the lower foliage, wound the base, treat with rooting hormone, and hold them in a cold frame or under mist through the winter. Rooting is slow — months, not weeks — but the success rate is reasonable and the resulting plant is the same sex and form as its parent.

Host plant of the juniper hairstreak butterfly and nothing else will do; the winter fruit that cedar waxwings are named for; and the dense evergreen cover that gets songbirds through the coldest nights of the year.

Red cedar is not a human food. What it does instead is cover three needs that almost nothing else in a winter landscape covers.

Host plant. The juniper hairstreak (Callophrys gryneus) is a small, startlingly emerald butterfly whose caterpillars feed on red cedar foliage and effectively nothing else. Where old cedars are cleared, the butterfly disappears from the area; where a few are left standing, it persists. A handful of other moths use it too, but the hairstreak is the reason this tree belongs in a butterfly planting.

Winter food. The waxy blue cones ripen in fall and hold on through the hungriest weeks of the year. The cedar waxwing takes its name from this tree and arrives in flocks to strip it; bluebirds, robins, mockingbirds, purple finches, and yellow-rumped warblers all depend on it in late winter, and a good female cedar is one of the highest-value bird plants in the East for exactly the season when fruit is scarcest.

Shelter. Dense evergreen structure is the resource that vanishes from a deciduous landscape in November. Red cedar is a primary winter roost and an early-season nest site for a long list of songbirds, a windbreak that measurably reduces wind chill downwind, and cover for rabbits and deer. Set against that, remember the other half of the ledger: unchecked, this same tree converts grassland into closed cedar woodland and takes the grassland birds with it.

The wood that made American pencils, fence posts and cedar chests, the tree that colonized abandoned farmland across the East, and now the 'green glacier' advancing across prairie that no longer burns.

Red cedar's history is written in its heartwood. Straight-grained, soft, fragrant, and rot-resistant, it was the wood American pencils were made from for the better part of a century, until the good supply ran down and manufacturers switched largely to incense cedar from the West. The same wood built the cedar chests and closet linings that generations of households kept woolens in, and the fence posts that stood in the ground for fifty years without treatment. Colonial builders used it for shingles, sills, and boat frames.

Its ecological history is a story about fire. Red cedar has no thick fire-resistant bark and is killed outright by grass fire, so for millennia it was confined to rocky glades, bluffs, and other places fire could not reach — and some of those cliff-edge trees, ancient and stunted, are among the oldest living things in the East, well over five hundred years. When settlement suppressed fire and cleared farms, the tree was released. It swept into abandoned fields across the East as the classic old-field pioneer, and today, across Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, its advance into unburned grassland is described by rangeland scientists as a green glacier, one of the most consequential land-cover changes in the Great Plains.

That is the paradox worth carrying: the same qualities that make red cedar an indestructible, generous garden tree make it a landscape-scale problem where grassland is what needs defending.

The classic red cedar problems are self-inflicted: bare holes from cutting into brown wood, bagworms nobody picked off, rust on a neighbor's apples, and seedlings everywhere. Winter bronzing and inner needle drop are normal.

A bare brown hole where you pruned: permanent — red cedar does not resprout from old wood, so shear only into green growth and never try to reduce an overgrown plant by cutting hard. Branches stripped bare, small cones hanging everywhere: bagworms, and those cones are the bags. Pick every one off between fall and early spring; on evergreens this pest can kill the plant. Orange spots and defoliation on the apples nearby: cedar-apple rust — cut the brown galls out of the cedar in late winter and grow rust-resistant apple varieties, since in most of the East removing your cedar will not clear the air. Grey-brown dying shoot tips after a wet spring: tip blight; prune it out in dry weather, improve airflow, and stop overhead watering. Seedlings coming up all over the pasture and fence lines: normal — birds plant them. Pull them small or mow; a two-year seedling already needs a saw. Foliage turning bronze or purplish in hard cold: normal winter color for the species, not damage. Dead brown foliage inside the plant: normal interior shading — but clear it out where fire is a risk. Never any blue berries: the plant is male; buy a named female selection.

One of the most climate-tolerant natives there is - zones 3 to 9, from -40 F to Deep South heat, drought, wind, salt spray and alkaline soil. Its limits are shade and standing water, not weather.

Red cedar has the widest range of any conifer in the eastern United States and behaves accordingly. Zones 3-5: reliably hardy to around −40 °F, and the standard shelterbelt conifer of the northern plains; expect bronze-purple winter foliage, which is normal. Zones 6-8: its heartland, at home on limestone glades, old fields, and clay alike, with heat and drought tolerance that few evergreens match. Zone 9 and the coastal Southeast: excellent, and the coastal form, southern red cedar, handles salt spray and humid heat better still. It also tolerates alkaline soil, which rules out most conifer alternatives in limestone country.

Its limits are simple: it will not grow in deep shade, and it will not tolerate saturated ground. Everything else — wind, drought, poor soil, road salt, urban conditions, coastal exposure — it takes in stride.

Two regional cautions rather than climatic ones. In the Great Plains and prairie states, deliberately planting red cedar near remnant grassland adds to a documented invasion problem, and local guidance often runs the other way entirely. And in any fire-prone region, its flammability is a siting constraint that matters more than its hardiness does.