Full Moon Phenology: January

Before winter returned in earnest, the full moon after Yule seemed to bring nightly snow to the yard every time we looked out the second floor windows after dark. From that angle, the moonlight reflecting off the barren frozen ground had a luminosity suggesting that a sudden squall had passed and dropped a blanket of snow. We all had to actually go downstairs and outside to verify that this was not the case.

In reality, the ground almost wanted to thaw due to so many warm days, with several January highs in the mid 50s in our narrow, sheltered valley. Our canis familiaris, Crow, produced the first deer tick of 2012after I took him on a ridgetop hikeand he spent an hour snuffling through the brush, where several recent nights have remained frost free.

My descent took me through a steep open area where my son and I had planted a dozen white pines last April, and I could find no survivors. When I wrote about evergreens for the November moon, I heaped high praise on the small stand of Northern whitecedar rooted on the lower western slope. The eastern slope, where the pines failed, is amply provided with Eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana), a tree that I have heretofore underestimated.

These trees thrive on that hill, which was heavily grazed by cattle for decades and still features terraced paths paved by countless hoofprints. Having repeatedly heard the association between redcedars and the rocky "goat pasture" of our region's craggiest heights, I once wrongly assumed that they were opportunistic extraterritorial invaders. When we took one for a Christmas tree again this year, I saw it as part of a productive eradication.

Then a friend lent me a copy of Donald Culross Peattie's "A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America" over the New Year's holiday. Peattie extols the virtues of every species, and points to the fact that Eastern redcedar heartwood was used to make virtually every American pencil manufactured until the early 1900s. While that industry moved west in search of incense cedar after the last great virgin stands were eradicated in the east, in places like Tennessee redcedar still carries the common name pencil cedar. One factor that expedited its demise was that 70 percent of the wood was wasted in the process.

Peattie also explains that the statelier form of the tree found on the Eastern Seaboard was frequently planted to accentuate the approach to a farm or provide windbreaks. I had just encountered a half dozen much larger specimens in shelterbelt formation during a recent visit to a neighboring ridgetop farm, and their thick twisted trunks were a true surprise in a place where I have come to expect the imported Norway spruce.

 The sparse and erratic form of the redcedars on our hill hardly evoke the deltoid perfection that one thinks of in a tannenbaum. But the fact that they are so abundant that the loss of a single specimen will never be noticed, and that even a four-year-old girl can march from her front door a short way up the hill to make a few brave cuts with the bucksaw, make it an obvious choice for our Christmas tradition in the hollow. They green up beautifully from a burnt pastel slumber when brought inside and watered. A week later, the branches go into the New Years fire and I save the trunk as a post that will endure the elements in some future fence line.

Eastern red cedar is known as a pioneer invader, a term that may not flatter but means that it is among the first species to repopulate damaged and eroded slopes in its range, and thus an important ally in keeping soil uphill where it belongs. In Peattie's eloquent telling: "No stone-walled hilltop too bleak, no abandoned field too thin of soil but that the dark and resolute figure of the red cedar may take its stand there, enduring, with luck, perhaps three centuries." Other sources cite specimens that lived for nearly a millennium.

The beautiful and mysterious Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) gets its name from its fondness for this juniper's berries and cones, and John James Audubon depicted the bird amidst its evergreen leaves. Pencils, erosion control, and waxwing fondness aside, Eastern red cedar has long been notorious as the alternative host for cedar-apple rust, a disease that causes orchard owners to put a bounty on its scraggly endurance. But I'm no longer feeling a strong inclination to hasten its demise.
Michael Nordskog's book, The Opposite of Cold: The Northwoods Finnish Sauna Tradition, published in 2011 by the University of Minnesota Press, won the Minnesota Book Award for general nonfiction, as well as a Midwest Book Award. He lives on a farm near Avalanche with his wife and three children.