Eastern Red Cedar, Eastern Pencil Juniper in Stock!

Cedar wood is a colloquial term that can be used to describe a wide variety of wood species. In Germany, cedar wood is generally understood to mean the wood of the Virginia juniper, which we often encounter in everyday life: in very good quality pencils, in the form of moth rings, clothes hangers, shoe trees or for smoking purposes.  In reality, the unprofessionally called cedar and so characteristically fragrant wood is a tree of the juniper family, biologically called Juniperus Virginiana. The virginia juniper grows as Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus Virginiana) on the east coast of the United States, but has been introduced as a tree in Germany for hundreds of years. Frederick the Great had specimens of these trees planted on Peacock Island in Berlin, and large plantations of about 5000 of these trees in stone near Nuremberg are known to have been planted by Freiherr A. W. Faber for his pencil factory around 1870. Here pencil cedar was deliberately planted as wood for the production of pencils. With a lot of luck we were able to buy a Virginia juniper grown in Germany, probably from the vicinity of these plantations, and process it into sawn timber. The tree has a very large diameter of over 60 cm and had to be felled because of its old age and a rotten core. We now have this wood in stock and are pleased to be able to offer our customers this very special material. Since the tree has grown up in a dense forest, there are hardly any branches to disturb the straight growth of the wood. With free-growing specimens, it is common for the tree trunk to be strongly interspersed with branches, making the wood difficult to use.