The Cedar Tree and Me

 

How strong is the cedar tree? This one is growing from the fork of a giant  maple, 5 feet above the ground

The most perfect Christmas trees I have ever seen are found along the highway between Springfield Missouri and Branson. They are perfectly formed, many not much wider than a lampshade and five or six feet tall.  There they are there for the taking, small, medium and large; all perfectly formed due to their environment, which gives them no plant competition and full sunlight, plenty of rain and ideal soil.  

The Highway Department apparently has no idea what they are worth.  If they would put ordinary entrepreneurs in charge of harvesting and selling them, I think they could make a hundred thousand dollars from those cedars each December.  But, they aren’t so interested in ‘making’ money as they are in increasing taxes! 

Common sense often is rare outside the Ozarks.  City folks buy bottled water that tastes awful! However, if you see one of those perfect Christmas trees along the highway, mark it. Then at night you can have pickup trouble right where it is.  It don’t take no time to cut a cedar tree off a hillside where you had to stop for whatever legitimate reason. I might try that! If I get caught, I suspect I will have to pay a fine nearly equal to that which city suburbanites pay for their Christmas trees legally.

The cedar trees we put to such good use for Christmas trees in my youth are not really cedars, they are junipers …technically speaking of course. ‘Eastern Red Cedar’ is a common name for those trees, and that sounds a lot better than ‘juniper’.  This week as I rambled through the woods, exploring a place I had never seen before, I found a 15-foot cedar tree that had two big scrapes under it’s outer branches where a buck had been leaving his scent, and checking for doe scent.  These ‘scrapes’ are just places underneath overhanging tree branches where bucks prepare scent posts, and scrape away leaves and vegetation on each visit before peeing in the spot.  

They bite at the overhanging branches, and break the tips of them, and rub glands just below the eye against those branches.  I have watched them do it, and it is a fascinating thing.  They make scrapes underneath large cedars, and hardwoods alike, and any novice hunter can find them in November and December, by looking along trails and field borders. 

But this big cedar tree I found was about eight inches in diameter, and a buck had been using the trunk of the cedar as a ‘rub’… a place of a mock fight, skinning up the bark. Bucks love cedars and pines for such fighting and rubbing posts, and it is true that in general, bigger sets of antlers are used on bigger trunks, up to five or six inches in diameter.  And the bucks with smaller antlers usually pick out a smaller sapling only an inch or two thick.  

        It is hard for me to accept that a whole generation of people now go onto city lots and buy Christmas trees, a large number of them spruce or pine instead of cedar. And they pay for them!   They will spend enough on some trucked-in, bound-up tree to buy two or three boxes of shotgun shells, and then throw it away in less than a month.  What the heck has this world come to?!!         Dad and I always went out to neighboring farms in early December, hunting rabbits and quail and farm-pond ducks and at the end of the day, we’d find a perfect cedar Christmas tree which we brought home to set up in the corner in a bucket and decorate.  In doing so, the whole house smelled like Christmas.  That’s because cedar trees smell like Christmas more than anything else, and if it isn’t that way at your place, you are not keeping up with tradition.  Cedar trees, baked cookies and a wet beagle … those are the smells of Christmas.

       So my advice…take an axe and go get a cedar tree with your kids or grandkids, somewhere where you have permission to be, and keep the tradition growing.  And just remember, that old Ozark adage…“shoot a buck, save a tree!” I made that one up. Come muzzle-loader season… that may be my aim, saving cedar trees from some old scraggly-horned buck.

 

       Don’t forget folks, I will be at my Big Piney Nature Center, 6410 Hwy 63 to the south of Houston Missouri from 1 to 4  this coming Friday afternoon and 1 to 4 on Saturday, the 14^th.  The purpose will be giving away a special book I have written for youngsters who like to read and the selling of books and magazines for Christmas gifts and.  But on the 14^th I will be in Houston at the Health Food Center doing the same thing from 10 a.m. to noon.  If you know a kid who needs a good book of short stories for Christmas, come by and see me.

 

       More info at www.larrydablemont.com or on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com or E-mail me at lightninridge47@gmail.com