Collection: Juniperus Seeds

Explore our Juniperus seeds — the junipers, evergreen trees and shrubs of the cypress family, Cupressaceae, distributed across the Northern Hemisphere from the Arctic south to tropical Africa. Seedlings bear sharp needle-like leaves, and many species change to overlapping scale-like leaves as they mature. The female cones have fleshy scales fused into a berry-like structure around hard-shelled seeds.

From the Mediterranean come Juniperus oxycedrus, the prickly juniper or cade, with needles in threes and orange-red cones 7–12 mm across, and the scale-leaved J. phoenicea and J. turbinata. Kew treats J. turbinata, native from the Mediterranean to the north-west Arabian Peninsula, as a species separate from J. phoenicea of Spain, France, Italy, the Balearic Islands and Sardinia. The Chinese juniper, J. chinensis, is a variable tree or shrub of eastern Asia with blue-black cones. North America supplies J. virginiana, the eastern red cedar, with red-brown peeling bark; J. osteosperma, the Utah juniper, a shrub or small tree of dry soils in the western United States; and J. deppeana, the alligator juniper of Mexico and the south-western United States, whose bark cracks into small square plates.

Juniper seed has a hard coat and needs cold stratification, often as a sequence of cold, warm and cold periods of two to three months each. Sown in a cold frame, some seed germinates the following spring but most takes another year. J. oxycedrus succeeds in most well-drained soils in full sun and tolerates drought once established.

• Evergreen conifers of the family Cupressaceae
• Needle-like juvenile and scale-like adult foliage
• Berry-like cones with hard-shelled seeds
• Species from the Mediterranean, eastern Asia and North America
• Seed needs cold stratification and is slow to germinate

Want an established specimen instead? Find it among our Juniperus plants.