The dark, dense trees covering these hillsides are Ashe juniper, and they are not cedars. The name stuck because the wood smells like one. They are also not newcomers: juniper pollen appears in Central Texas sediment cores well back into the Pleistocene, and Ferdinand Lindheimer, botanising in this country in 1845, described wide cedar brakes along the Comal River. What has changed is the proportion. A century of suppressed grassfires and heavy grazing removed the fine fuel that used to kill juniper seedlings, and the tree spread out of the canyons and rocky rims and onto ground that had been open grassland. The result is a tree that is genuinely native and genuinely more abundant than it used to be, which is why the argument about it never quite settles. The tree carries a reputation it has had trouble shaking. The claim that a juniper drinks thirty gallons a day traces to a single study from the 1990s. Later measurements found Ashe juniper using about as much water as a live oak of similar size, and a 2010 analysis by Bradford Wilcox attributed the drop in Hill Country spring flow between 1890 and 1960 mainly to overgrazing and lost topsoil rather than to brush. The pollen is real enough. Ashe juniper releases in December and January, unusually for a tree, and a hard north wind can lift visible clouds of it off the ridges. That is the cedar fever that fills Central Texas clinics in midwinter. The same shaggy bark is also the only material the golden-cheeked warbler will build a nest from.
Getting there
30.1983, -98.1617
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
