What is mountain cedar? KSAT Explains

First thing to know about mountain cedar: they technically aren't cedar trees at all.What we call 'cedar trees' are a type of juniper tree -- speci...

January 31, 2023
3:30 AM

First thing to know about mountain cedar: they technically aren't cedar trees at all.What we call 'cedar trees' are a type of juniper tree -- specifically Ashe juniper -- named after William Willard Ashe (1872-1932), who was a pioneer forester for the United States Forest Service.True cedar trees reside near the Mediterranean Sea, around Europe and northern Africa. However, juniper trees here in Texas do bear at least some resemblance to cedar trees.'So a lot of the explorers, when they were first coming to the western United States, encountering these trees, they just referred to them as cedars because of that resemblance,' says Karl Flocke -- a woodland ecologist with Texas A&M Forest Service.

Sarah Spivey