Minnesota's Cedar Trees

Great native trees for wildlife

Cedar trees thrive in Minnesota with the white cedar growing in the northern part of the state and the red cedar native in the southern half. Cedars have scaled needles and threadlike bark with both species growing in difficult soil conditions. White cedars will grow on rocky ground with minimal soil and red cedars can tolerate dry, gravelly soil. Both species are abundant, hardy and provide great cover especially in the winter.

Often on subzero days, I find birds in the red cedars by my house.

Barred Owl warming in the sun on a subzero day

Red cedars are important to chickadees for cover and foraging

In the right conditions, red cedars can become volunteers or trees that sprout up easily without being deliberately planted. They are good evergreen trees for areas that watering is not ideal or are undergoing climate change effects as these trees will flourish in dry conditions without any fuss. They can overrun prairie areas and often need to be managed to keep those areas open. One caution about red cedars is that they are a host to cedar-apple rust that can damage the leaves of crapapples and hawthorns nearby.

White cedars are also know as the American Arborvitae. The nursery stock that is so popular in our gardens are cultivars of this native species.

White cedar growing next to the Tettegouche Falls in northern Minnesota

According to the Adirondacks Forever Wild website:

The name Thuja is said to be derived from the Greek Thuia, which is the name of a Greek juniper. The species name (occidentalis) means "western," differentiating this plant from old world plants.

Other names for this plant include Eastern White Cedar, Eastern Thuja, Arborvitae, Arbor Vitae, American Arborvitae, and Eastern Arborvitae. Arborvitae means Tree of Life, which is a reference to the story that the vitamin C in a tea made from the foliage from this tree helped Jacques Cartier and his crew recover from scurvy in the 16th century. Northern White Cedar has also been called Swamp Cedar or Swamp-Cedar, referring to this tree's ability to thrive in wetlands.

The one caution about white cedar, as many gardeners know, is it is a favorite winter food for browsing deer.

The seeds of both species are excellent bird food. What really differentiates these two species is their cones. What we think of as berries on the red cedar are actually cones containing 1-3 seeds.

Red cedar “berries” are actually fleshy, blue cones!

The white cedar has more traditional looking small cones that start off yellow in color and ripen to brown color before releasing seeds.

Northern white cedar cones in the yellow growth stage

I will leave you with a prior post of the most well-known bird associated with the red cedar tree: