A Prairie Garden Journal    by Dick Meyer

In Memory of Cedar Trees

The day was sunny.  We hadn’t caught any fish to speak of on this particular once or twice a year fishing trip that one or two of his sons got to take with their father.   Perhaps that’s because fishing trips were often scheduled in the middle of the night, as a heavy thunderstorm passed over our northeast Nebraska farm and cancelled the plans for the next day’s farm work.   The next morning at breakfast the invitation would be, “Who wants to go fishing today?”  The sons who accepted the invitation were sent out after breakfast to turn over as many old boards and cement blocks as necessary to fill a can full of worms, while Dad pulled out his amply equipped tackle box and carefully stored fishing rods.  The sons grabbed the nearest kid fishin’ pole, and perhaps a small old tackle box with a few number 8 hooks and one ounce sinkers in it, and before your knew it, we were on our way to Decatur, Nebraska, the closest point to our farm where the Missouri River passed.

When my son was about ten years old, I took him with me on a road trip to attend a large nursery trade show in Portland, Oregon.  Some of the most treasured pictures in my mental scrapbook are those of his mostly grinning, occasionally grimacing, image standing beneath the “welcome to” signs as we entered each of the ten states that we traveled through on that two week trip.  It was on that trip, as we left Portland and traveled down the Oregon coast en route to the redwood forests of northern California that I first rediscovered the beauty of the juniper tree—as an adult.  Like most tourists driving the Oregon coast for the first time I found myself stopping at frequent intervals to take pictures of the overwhelming beauty that reemerges around almost every curve in the highway.

Previous Articles

Fractions March 15
Yardner March 8
Urban Legends of Trees March 22
Que Serra, Serra March 29
Grocery Store or Garbage Dumpster Plants April 5
Planning Your Landscape Project April 12
Planting Cool Trees April 19
Keeping Trees Alive April 26
Thrillers, Chillers, Spillers May 03
Will You Still Love Them May 10
Ornamental Grasses May 17

2006 Articles

“A wet seat, and a hungry gut—that’s a fisherman’s luck.”  was my Dad’s motto about fishing.   He could generally be counted on to offer that bit of outdoorsman philosophy after several “unsuccessful” hours of fishing,  Maybe he wanted to catch fish, or maybe he didn’t.  His sons will each have their own opinion on that subject.  They will agree that he rarely caught any fish. 

I don’t remember if we caught any fish that particular day.  I do remember that on the way home, we passed by a long windbreak of cedar trees—now I call them by their horticulturally correct name—junipers.  But as a child I just knew them as cedars trees.  In those years, cedar windbreaks were relatively rare in eastern Nebraska.  Most windbreaks in that part of the state had been planted to Siberian elm, cottonwood, or hackberry back in the dustbowl years.  So a tree row made up of juniper, I mean cedars, was relatively unusual. 

I remember the stark, angular form and distinctive dark green summertime color of the trees.   As I recall, it was a long, two-mile tree row, which meant that at the speed my father drove, the tree row seemed to go on forever.  Or maybe I just wanted it to.

I did not bring that momentary affection for junipers with me as I began my landscaping career.   Somehow, cedars just were not quite symmetrical enough, or not quite green enough, or perhaps not quite exotic enough to earn a spot in my early landscape designs.  Why plant junipers, when spruce, pine, and fir were readily available and ever so much “better trees”?

My father was still alive when I took the road trip with my son, and I think that on a subsequent visit back to eastern Nebraska, I told him about how that juniper on the Oregon coast had given me a new appreciation for the scenic beauty  of the junipers I had long overlooked in my own home state.   And I think I mentioned to him my memories of that long row of cedar trees we passed coming home from fishing many years before.

He died several years later and was buried on a snowy March morning in a cemetery located on a cedar strewn hill which overlooks the Elkhorn River near West Point, NE.   The day of his funeral was too filled with condolences and recollections to notice much about the landscape surrounding his gravesite.

It wasn’t until almost a year later during one of those solitary cemetery visits that are sometimes needed to say a few words that are often too difficult for a child to say to a living parent that I had the opportunity to take in the landscape surrounding my father’ grave.  I was pleased to find that barely twenty feet away stands a majestic, and somewhat windswept, cedar tree.