Cedar

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

a name applied indiscriminately to several evergreen trees with aromatic wood. The cedar of history is the cedar of Mt. Lebanon in Palestine. When Solomon purposed building a temple he sent his men, 10,000 a month, by agreement with Hiram of Tyre, to hew cedars of Lebanon. "Hiram gave Solomon cedar trees and fir trees according to all his desire, and Solomon gave Hiram 20,000 measures of wheat for food to his household." Cedars of Lebanon are to be found about 6,000 feet above the sea level. They are widely branching, hospitable trees with limbs extending horizontally as though each branch and its twigs had been pressed flat. "The cedar spreads his dark green layers of shade," says Tennyson. Cones four to five inches in length rise from the upper surfaces like candles on a Christmas tree. The tree grows to a height of eighty feet. A few fine old specimens are left on Mt. Lebanon with a girth of from fifty to sixty feet and a breadth of top nearly double their height. The Arabs regard them with the utmost reverence. The cedar of Lebanon is fragrant, and was much prized for cabinet purposes. A number of fine specimens over 200 years old flourish in English parks, but our climate is too trying for them. The deodar of the Himalayas, "the tree of the gods," from which Kipling's Under the Deodars takes its name, is a genuine cedar. A third cedar is that of the Atlas Mountains in Africa. There are but the three. The woods known in America are related, but are not genuine cedars. Our red cedar, so much used for the wood of lead-pencils, anti-moth fur chests, and cabinet work, has beautiful, close-grained red wood even more fragrant than the cedar of Lebanon, but it is a smaller tree and is known to botanists as the Virginian juniper. The white cedar, with loose shreddy bark, of our eastern swamps, much used for fence posts, is also a tree of another name belonging to the pine-family, and stands half way between a cypress and a cedar. Several other trees commonly called cedars and cypresses are only near relatives. The red cedar or juniper, once abundant on the Atlantic coast, is now to be sought in Florida. The demand for cedar wood for lead-pencils and penholders has been so great that cedar fences seventy-five years old have been purchased at high prices and sent to the mill. See Conifer; Lead-Pencil