Species Spotlight: Eastern Red Cedar
Looks Like: This medium-height evergreen tree has overlapping scaled needles and reddish brown bark that peels in long strips. In open areas, the dense foliage takes on an oval or cone-shaped form.
Grows In: Red cedar is highly tolerant of a wide range of conditions, from dry rocky soils to moist swamps and able to withstand climactic extremes. It is often an early colonizer of abandoned farm fields.
Niche: Seed cones are an important winter food source for many birds and mammals, and dense evergreen boughs provide shelter for roosting, nesting, and concealment. Red cedar’s well-developed root system helps to stabilize thin soils and prevents erosion in areas with high wind exposure.
Frequency: Common across the eastern United States.
Reproduction: Eastern red cedar is a dioecious species, which means that male and female reproductive structures occur on different trees. Male pollen cones (called strobili), about the size of a grain of rice, open their tightly sealed scales when ripe to release a puff of pollen in early spring. Female cones begin as small, spiky structures designed to receive wind-borne pollen. The seed cones become fleshy and resinous as they ripen into blue-purple berrylike fruits. Mature trees typically produce seeds every year, with a spike in production every 2–3 years. Birds play an important role in seed dispersal by consuming the abundant fruit and distributing the seeds across the landscape, which has been shown to improve germination rates.
Fun Facts: Red cedar wood is prized as a building material for its attractive color and natural pest-resistance as a result of fragrant compounds in the bark. A fungus called Cedar-Apple Rust requires both eastern red cedar and apple trees as hosts during its lifecycle. On red cedar, look for a hard brown growth, marble-sized or larger. After a warm spring rainstorm, the gall sprouts gelatinous orange horns. Spores that emanate from these tendrils travel by wind to nearby apple orchards and inflict rust-colored spots on leaves and fruit.
