Juniperus procera, commonly known in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 as African Juniper or East African Juniper, is a conifer

Pinophyta

The conifers, division Pinophyta, also known as division Coniferophyta or Coniferae, are one of 13 or 14 division level taxa within the Kingdom Plantae. Pinophytes are gymnosperms. They are cone-bearing seed plants with vascular tissue; all extant conifers are woody plants, the great majority being...

ous tree native to the mountains of eastern Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

 from eastern Sudan

Sudan

Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...

 south to Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...

, and the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula

Arabian Peninsula

The Arabian Peninsula is a land mass situated north-east of Africa. Also known as Arabia or the Arabian subcontinent, it is the world's largest peninsula and covers 3,237,500 km2...

. It is a characteristic tree of the Afromontane

Afromontane

Afromontane is a term used to describe the Afrotropic subregion and its plant and animal species common to the mountains of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula...

 flora.

It medium-sized tree

Tree

A tree is a perennial woody plant. It is most often defined as a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance. A minimum height specification at maturity is cited by some authors, varying from 3 m to...

 reaching 20-25 m (rarely 40 m) tall, with a trunk up to 1.5-2 m diameter and a broadly conical to rounded or irregular crown. The leaves

Leaf

A leaf is an organ of a vascular plant, as defined in botanical terms, and in particular in plant morphology. Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves as a feature of plants....

 are of two forms, juvenile needle-like leaves 8-15 mm long on seedlings, and adult scale-leaves 0.5-3 mm long on older plants, arranged in decussate pairs or whorls of three. It is largely dioecious

Plant sexuality

Plant sexuality covers the wide variety of sexual reproduction systems found across the plant kingdom. This article describes morphological aspects of sexual reproduction of plants....

 with separate male and female plants, but some individual plants produce both sexes. The cones

Conifer cone

A cone is an organ on plants in the division Pinophyta that contains the reproductive structures. The familiar woody cone is the female cone, which produces seeds. The male cones, which produce pollen, are usually herbaceous and much less conspicuous even at full maturity...

 are berry-like, 4-8 mm in diameter, blue-black with a whitish waxy bloom, and contain 2-5 seed

Seed

A seed is a small embryonic plant enclosed in a covering called the seed coat, usually with some stored food. It is the product of the ripened ovule of gymnosperm and angiosperm plants which occurs after fertilization and some growth within the mother plant...

s; they are mature in 12-18 months. The male cones are 3-5 mm long, and shed their pollen in early spring.

It is the only juniper to occur south of the equator

Equator

An equator is the intersection of a sphere's surface with the plane perpendicular to the sphere's axis of rotation and containing the sphere's center of mass....

, and is thought to be a relatively recent colonist of Africa; the species shows very little of the variability associated with a long period of evolution (Farjon 2005). It is closely related to Juniperus excelsa

Juniperus excelsa

Juniperus excelsa is a juniper found throughout the eastern Mediterranean, from northeastern Greece and southern Bulgaria across Turkey to Syria and the Lebanon, and the Caucasus mountains. A subspecies, J. excelsa subsp...

from southwestern Asia, probably deriving from a common ancestor with that species in southwestern Asia.

Uses:
It is an important timber tree, used for building houses, for poles, for furniture; bark used for beehives.