Leaves usually opposite, acute or acuminate or occasionally obtuse, rounded and glandular or eglandular on the back, about 1/16′ long, dark blue-green or glaucous (var. _glauca_ Carr.), at the north turning russet or yellow-brown during the winter, beginning in their third season to grow hard and woody, and remaining two or three years longer on the branches, on young plants and vigorous branchlets linear-lanceolate, long-pointed, light yellow-green, without glands, ½′—¾′ long. Flowers: diœcious or very rarely monœcious: male with 10 or 12 stamens, their connectives rounded and entire, with 4 or occasionally 5 or 6 pollen-sacs; scales of the female flower violet color, acute and spreading, becoming obliterated from the fruit. Fruit subglobose, ¼′—⅓′ in diameter, pale green when fully grown, dark blue and covered with a glaucous bloom at maturity, with a firm skin, thin sweetish resinous flesh, and 1 or 2 or rarely 3 or 4 seeds; seeds acute and occasionally apiculate at apex, ⅙′—⅛′ long, with a comparatively small 2-lobed hilum, and 2 cotyledons. A tree, occasionally 100° high, with a trunk 3°—4° in diameter, often lobed and eccentric, and frequently buttressed toward the base, generally not more than 40°—50° tall, with short slender branches horizontal on the lower part of the tree, erect above, forming a narrow compact pyramidal head, in old age usually becoming broad and round-topped or irregular, and slender branchlets terete after the disappearance of the leaves and covered with close dark brown bark tinged with red or gray; on exposed cliffs on the coast of Maine, sometimes only a few inches high with long branches forming broad dense mats. Bark ⅛′—¼′ thick, light brown tinged with red, and separated into long narrow scales fringed on the margins, and persistent for many years. Wood light, close-grained, brittle, not strong, dull red, with thin nearly white sapwood, very fragrant, easily worked; largely used for posts, the sills of buildings, the interior finish of houses, the lining of closets and chests for the preservation of woolens against the attacks of moths, and largely for pails and other small articles of wooden ware. A decoction of the fruit and leaves is used in medicine, and oil of red cedar distilled from the leaves and wood as a perfume. Distribution. Dry gravelly slopes and rocky ridges, often immediately on the seacoast, from southern Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to the coast of Georgia, the interior of southern Alabama and Mississippi, and westward to the valley of the lower Ottawa River, southern Michigan, eastern North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, and eastern Texas, not ascending the mountains of New England and New York nor the high southern Alleghanies; in middle Kentucky and Tennessee, and northern Alabama and Mississippi, covering great areas of low rolling limestone hills with nearly pure forests of small bushy trees.