The Juniper

You may be wondering by now what on earth a juniper berry is.  Here you are:

Juniper trees are the only ones I see on a daily basis out here, each eking out a living on a patch of desert sand.  At a slightly higher elevation, you'll also find some pinyon pines, but other than that this country is a bunch of shrubs and rocks.  It's a far cry from what I'm used to in the rain-soaked Pacific Northwest, where big green trees line the city streets and moss creeps out of every corner, but I'm learning to love the desert landscape.

They frame things nicely, too.   Junipers around Hovenweep's Twin Towers.

Juniper berries are not actually berries.  They are cones with "unusally fleshy and merged scales" (says Wikipedia), which makes them look like little blue or purple-ish berries, but when you open them up you'll find a hard seed on the inside.

It was while trying to peel off the outer layer of a juniper berry to see exactly what was under its skin that I finally came up with a name for my blog.  Wandering among juniper forests and especially if you smell the leaves--which seem to be more scaley needle-like things than leaves--up close, you'll notice a very faint sweet smell coming from them.  This scent is intensely magnified when you peel open a juniper berry and the sticky inside is smeared over your fingers.  I had a realization that this was one of my favorite things about the desert, this delicious smell.  It reminds me of pine sap from back home, but tinged with a distinctive desert flavor, a honey-like scent that only comes from this place.

You should smell the desert when it rains; when the juniper and sagebrush and sand-dirt that covers everything mix with water droplets to fill up every bit of the air.  It is as wonderfully refreshing as the just-rained smell you get back in the northwest (or other places with ground that has actual dirt on it and smells "earthy") but here it comes with a unique desert sweetness, that hint of honey-like juniper and extra sense of renewal that even the slightest rainfall brings to such a dry land.

Anyway, those juniper berries, to me, are one of the "sweetest things in the desert," along with the amazing sense of solitude one finds out here, in a landscape where there is so much room to explore and little to get in the way of your thoughts.

It turns out different varieties of juniper trees grow all over the Northern Hemisphere.  The one I'm most familiar with is the Utah Juniper, or Juniperus osteosperma.  Besides juniper berries, they grow these really interesting things called galls which are growths caused by the Juniper Tip Midge, but are actually quite pretty: