With Red Oak leaves in the foreground, the evergreen Ashe Juniper and its dusky blue berries is a striking color combination.
Ashe Juniper is a such a fantastic wildlife tree — with its berries, foliage, canopy, and bark, it serves many an animal species. But many humans aren’t crazy about the tree. Those who can’t stand it likely suffer from seasonal allergies, because the pollen of this tree is the major culprit behind many a runny nose for several months of the year. Other naysayers are ranchers, because Ashe Juniper has a knack for taking advantage of overgrazed land. Ashe Juniper is so misunderstood that many people refer to it as “cedar,” but in fact it is not a cedar tree at all! And here in Central Texas, we have the highest numbers of Ashe Junipers around, so I assume that the allergy professionals in our area all have thriving businesses.
The blue-colored berries of the female Ashe Juniper are popular with local and migratory birds, as well as mammals.
Unfortunately, Ashe Juniper’s bad reputation has made many people overlook its exceptional value to wildlife. It’s a top ten for many berry-eating birds, including Cedar Waxwings, American Robins, and Mockingbirds. And the birds are important to the tree as well — they consume the berries and disperse the seeds. In fact, the seeds’ germination rates improve greatly once they pass through an avian digestive system. Mammals such as foxes and raccoons also consume the berries, and deer will munch on the foliage when food is scarce in the winter.
Up in the canopy, the dense evergreen foliage offers year-round cover and favorable nesting sites for birds. Even the long strips of exfoliated bark from older Ashe Junipers serve as an important nest material for different bird species.
Birds such as the endangered Golden-Cheeked Warbler use Ashe Juniper bark strips for nest material.
And the Ashe Juniper is a larval host for a very beautiful butterfly, the Juniper Hairstreak.
The Juniper Hairstreak butterfly is named for the tree it depends on.
The male Ashe Juniper is notorious for its winter pollen, wreaking havoc among the noses of the allergen-sensitive.
Out in the hill country, ranchers put a lot of blame on Ashe Juniper for how it spreads so easily. And yet the reason it does is because of how vastly the agricultural industry has altered the landscape over the past two centuries. Overgrazing, the suppression of fire, and the historic felling of giant groves of trees to create crop fields or grassland have all had a drastic effect on the biodiversity of native plants.
One of the first trees to return to cleared or damaged land happens to be the native Ashe Juniper, and since overgrazing selectively removes natural plant competition, before long it can create a thicket. However, studies are showing that Ashe Juniper is not a heavy water user, as many people believe, nor does it prevent plants from growing under its branches, as others have complained. Yaupon, Texas Smoke Tree, Cedar Sage, Silk Tassel, and Zexmenia, for example, all thrive in the understory of the Ashe Juniper.
Ashe Juniper frustrates ranchers because it easily grows when overgrazing and land clearing have removed natural competition.
Because Ashe Juniper and humans haven’t had the best relationship, people seem quick to want to cut down the trees. The commercial value of Ashe Junipers — rot-resistant wood and useful insect-repellant oils — adds to the quick justification on such actions. But cutting down Ashe Junipers without discretion has had an unfortunate effect on animal species already suffering from habitat loss. For example, the endangered Golden-Cheeked Warbler depends entirely on mature groves of Ashe Juniper for its nesting material — even another species of Juniper won’t do.
A mature Ashe Juniper is a sight to behold from underneath its canopy.
I don’t mind blowing my nose for wildlife. That’s a small price to pay, compared to the one the animals have to for us.
Meredith O’Reilly gardens for wildlife in Austin, Texas, and writes about her garden adventures at Great Stems.
© 2010 – 2011, Meredith O’Reilly. All rights reserved. This article is the property of BeautifulWildlifeGarden.com If you are reading this at another site, please report that to us
About Meredith O'Reilly
This looks very similar to the Eastern Red Cedar (also a Juniper) Juniperus virginiana. Similar perceptions are held about it in the Upper Midwest as it tends to encroach on prairies without fire suppression. But it also has an important role like this Juniper you have highlighted for wildlife.
I will look for this next time I’m in Texas.
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Thank you for taking the time and sharing this information with us.
It was indeed very helpful and insightful while
being straight forward to the point.
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Please tell me where I can buy some trees
This tree is an abomination. it has been allowed to propogate beyond what I consider safe for places like Texas. It takes all the ground water, drops its needles to blanket the ground killing the grasses under each canopy. leads to more soil erosion. deer only eat the small tender shoots, not the older tree. few birds eat the berries. allergies are only a tiny problem. It chokes out real trees like elm, oak, maple. go look at some of the property around central TX, take some fotos and return each year and see what it is doing to our terrain. don’t eradicate it, but cull it before it is too late. I managed 100′s of acres and I watched my land change from a wooded area with creeks and springs with many statley shade trees to nothing more than a juniper grove with now ground water in less than 3 years! this tree is wrong and should really only be a shrub. get chopping!
Hi, Jason. Thank you for your comment. There have been many ongoing studies in regard to the amount of water Ashe Juniper uses, especially in how it does or does not affect run-off, infiltration, aquifer recharge, and so forth. It’s important to look at the most recent research, as much of what they are finding now actually casts a different light on what was previously believed about Ashe Juniper. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Edwards Aquifer website: “Indeed, a commonly heard criticism of Ashe juniper is they are “water-hogs”, robbing our Aquifer by using lots of water themselves and keeping water from reaching the ground. It’s true that in general, any mature woody plant in the Hill Country will use more water than grass. However, it is becoming clear the notion that cedars are high-water using is simply another myth. Cedars are extremely drought-tolerant, they only use water after significant rainfalls, and they have the ability to almost completely shut down when no water is available (Seiler, 2008). In July of 2008, Dr. Jim Heilman of Texas A&M University released research conclusions that show brushy species use only slightly more water than grassland, and that live oaks use more water than cedar. Further, removing cedar may be unwise because they are an important carbon sink, making them a potential ally in efforts to counter global warming. Heilman said “We’ve seen up to a six-fold increase [in carbon sequestration] with the encroachment of juniper. So, if we remove brush, we might have a marginal savings of water, but we’re losing a heck of a lot of carbon. Overall, Heilman said, the idea of brush removal to save water is a case of where “policy gets ahead of science” (Heilman, 2008).
Other research released in 2008 suggested that brushy areas do not hog water. In the Concho River basin, researchers studied three watersheds that supply tributaries of the Concho to evaluate the extent to which streamflow changed after dramatic shifts in vegetation cover. In the last 100 years or so, the watersheds have transitioned from pristine prairie to degraded pastureland to woodland/savanna, as have many watersheds across Texas. They found that in all three watersheds, stream baseflows have remained the same or increased slightly since 1960, despite large increases in woody plants.”
A Native Plant Society article states, “Dr. Owens, now at Oklahoma State, joined Dr. J.L. Heilman of Texas A&M and others in research focused on how water availability and aquifer recharge are affected by live oak and Ashe juniper encroachment into Edwards Plateau grasslands and savannas. This study that was published last year in the Journal of Hydrology.
The research was conducted on the Freedman Ranch near San Marcos during 2005 and 2006. Their conclusion was that the oak-juniper woodland relied heavily on water from recent rains, rather than water from deeper zones of root penetration. This casts doubt on the assumption ‘that woody species on the Plateau withdraw substantial amounts of water stored deep within the fractured bedrock which otherwise would find its way into the aquifer.’ They also found live oak used more water than juniper in that study area. ” Basically, the gist of it is that most water usage has to do with the water collected by the leaves during rainfall and not that they use a lot of water from the ground.
Ashe Juniper is a native tree and one that was a substantial part of Texas’ habitat before the vast clearing and overgrazing that began in the 1800s. Per the Edwards Aquifer website, “The modern myth of an open, practically treeless Hill Country where cedars are unnatural invaders developed as this process of re-growth proceeded, in the first half of the 20th century, when cedars began reclaiming what had always been theirs. By the middle of the 1900s many were claiming the cedar was not even native, a myth that is common even today. Proof positive that cedars are native can be found in ice age pollen. In the September 1995 issue of Quaternary Research, Stephen Hall and Salvatore Valastro presented a report on the southern great plains vegetation during the last ice age. The Friesenhahn Cave, located in northwest Bexar county, is included in the report as a site that produced juniper pollens dating back to the late ice age. ”
I do believe that a diversity of plants is important for wildlife. In our area, we have Ashe Juniper habitats that include such plants as Yaupon, Elbow Bush, American Beautyberry, Cedar Elm, Oak, and others. According to the Wildflower Center, “The uniquely rich and well-draining soil that builds up as juniper leaves fall and decompose is ideal for several native plants, some of which tend to occur almost exclusively in association with it, including Cedar Sage (Salvia roemeriana) and Cedar Rosette Grass (Dichanthelium pedicillatum). The beautiful but notoriously difficult to propagate Texas Madrone (Arbutus xalapensis) also seems to germinate best in the soil beneath these trees. Other central Texas plants often seen under or near it are American Smoke Tree (Cotinus obovatus), White Limestone Honeysuckle (Lonicera albiflora), Lindheimers Garrya (Garrya ovata var. lindheimeri), and Orange Zexmenia (Wedelia texana). Better known is that a rare warbler, the Golden-cheeked Warbler, uses Ashe Juniper bark almost exclusively to build its nests. Many kinds of wildlife eat the sweetish berries, and the durable wood is a local source of fenceposts.”
There are a lot of misconceptions about Ashe Juniper, and that was the point of my article. There may be areas where Ashe Juniper management is in order, but with the upward trend of heat patterns, Ashe Juniper might very well become one of the most valuable trees in our area. There are a lot of other sources of information available about Ashe Juniper, and I do encourage those interested to do their own research to learn more.
I’ve been trying to find positive facts on the Ashe Juniper for some time now. You say, “studies are showing that Ashe Juniper is not a heavy water user, as many people believe”. Where can I find these studies and the results of them? Thanks for all the info.
Hi, Charles. I just finished up a reply to Jason, which you can see above. Here are some useful websites you might want to visit: http://www.landsteward.net/mountain_cedar.html, http://www.edwardsaquifer.net/brush.html, and http://www.wildflower.org/. There are others, too — it can be a challenge to weed out the reports from the 1990s and get to the most recent ones, but fortunately, the first two websites I just listed have many of these reports identified if you’d like to seek out information in more detail. Thanks, and I hope you find the information you need!
Unlike the author, I greatly hate having to blow my nose constantly and have such a lack of energy suffering from this allergy. I hope it is considered an invasive species and eradicated, I know it would improve productivity. However I would want any environmental changes to be monitored and bad ashe juniper to be replaced with something less toxic and monitored for unintended consequences. Texas is native grasslands though, we don’t need a million juniper shrubs that are a pollutant to many people. Thanks for listening.
Hi, Karen. Thanks so much for your comment, and I’m so sorry to hear that you suffer from allergies. I know it’s hard to have any sort of an appreciation for a plant that brings such discomfort during pollen season. But I did want to let you know about a couple of inaccuracies in your comment, and I hope that you will be inspired to read more about the Ashe Juniper tree. Historically speaking, Ashe Juniper, which IS a native Texas tree, actually has had quite an impact on our state’s (and our country’s) growth and industry. Journal entries from explorers as far back as Cabeza de Vaca, Spanish missionaries, and our earliest naturalists describe its presence when they first reached the Hill Country long ago. But when settlers arrived, however, they immediately utilized the Ashe Juniper as a lumber source — over time it became popular for log houses, fence posts, and later railroad ties and telephone poles. Vast old-growth forests were cut down, which is why the Golden-Cheeked Warbler is now endangered. The lumber industry, along with overgrazing by livestock and clearing the land for agriculture, had a great impact on the ultimate terrain found in areas of Texas. But one that thing that is really remarkable about Texas is that it has such a variety of ecoregions, not just grassland, but pine forests, marshes, coastal areas, timber zones, plains, and more. Ashe Juniper grows in several of those areas, but is most prominent in Central Texas. It does establish easily, particular in those places overgrazed by livestock, but what we need is a good management system with controlled thinning to get back to to those old growth forests rather than an eradication of such a valuable and native plant.
I used to live in Comfort, Texas where this juniper grows thick so I understand the nature of this tree, all the good and bad things and so on. However I have moved away and now live in Washington state where this tree doesn’t exist. I would LOVE to find out where I can purchase some seedlings on up to several feet tall trees! I don’t believe this tree is half as bad as many people say it it, I’ve done many hours of research on it and have found many good things like you talk about. I live in the same zone here as I did in Texas so I would really appreciate someones help in getting maybe a dozen trees to plant up here and see if they take root! Any help would be great! Thanks, and thank you for spreading the word that these trees have been misunderstood!
Hi, Dave. I actually don’t know that the tree is sold anywhere, since it grows in so many places already and comes with such a bad, although misguided, reputation — the nursery industry probably wouldn’t see that as a worthwhile venture. I’ll bet you can find an alternative plant that is native to the Washington area that meets the same needs you have though — Washington is so beautiful!
Hi Dave,
In the past I’ve bought ashe juniper (Texas Mountain Cedar) at Rodhes Nursery in Garland. They have a great selection of natives. You might call them before you head out or see if they ship. Save one for me!! There aren’t too many of us that like the tree.
Scroll down to “trees” and you will see: Juniper, Ashe (juniperus ashei); 5 Gallon
http://www.beorganic.com/products/plants.html
I love all my Ashe juniper trees! I plan on collecting & germinating some seeds this Fall. I was wondering if you could give me some tips & advice on the process. I’m not sure when to plant and whether or not to water. Any help & instructions are appreciated! I tried & failed at transplanting.
Denise, I believe that the juniper seeds need cold stratification in order to germinate, so it’s good that you are planning of planting in fall. But other than that, I don’t have much advice, except that because Ashe Juniper has a high tolerance of poor soils, I wouldn’t expect it would have challenging needs. Good luck!