How can cedar trees be both a native and a weed?
On your next road trip out into the countryside, pay particular attention to the forest trees that you will see. During this season of the year, many of the trees are sound asleep; they appear skeletal, what with their total lack of leaves.
Not so the evergreens. This is the time of the year when it is easy to spot those trees that stay awake through the winter. They are all decked out with greenery. The trees of which I speak are the cedars.
Take note of how many cedars live out there on the outskirts of town. The abundance of the cedars has earned them the enmity of land managers; these professional people consider the cedar trees to be an undesirable weed that has gotten way out of control.
What is hard to comprehend about this is the indisputable fact that cedars are native plants. How is it possible that a native plant could earn an ominous mantle of being a despicable weed?
The answer to that question is all too easy to ascertain. You need only extend your arm and use your pointing finger to focus attention on you, me and, well, everybody. It all has to do with aversion to the beneficial role that prescribed burning can play in the forest ecosystem.
Before modern times, fires kept the cedars in check; in olden times, cedars could only live on precarious cliff faces — where fuels did not accumulate at the base of the trees. Modern man’s fascination with fire suppression has thrown a big monkey wrench into Ma Nature’s intricate ecological balance. In some instances, farsighted land managers are reintroducing prescribed fire as a valuable land management tool.
It is my fervent hope that more land management agencies will use enlightened land management practices to give the cedars some pushback. A native tree such as the cedar is desirable, but only if it is confined to its original niche out there in the forest ecosystem. We’d all be much happier if that end could be accomplished.