Eastern red cedars and juniper berries

Hello, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Eastern red cedars are actually junipers, Juniperus virginiana. Junipers have male and female flowers on separate trees. Right now, the female trees are almost bluish with thousands and thousands of what I call berries, but are actually fleshy cones, and our eastern red cedar is one of the junipers whose berries are used to flavor gin. In the play My Fair Lady, Eliza talks about when they thought her mother was dead, but her father kept putting spoons full of gin in her mouth. “She come to so soon, she bit the bowl off the spoon. Gin was mother’s milk to her. “ We dry juniper berries and use them in recipes, or put them in cheap vodka and voila – not English gin but pretty dang close – martinis anyone?