Attack of the clones: Thirty years ater, a Taylor-made mystery lives on

In the summer of 1978, Allen Wilke slammed the brakes.

He did this often. A true plantsman, he observed everything but the road itself. He would spy a flowering prickly pear in the ditch, a wild grapevine. He would double back without warning, often sending his son and daughter – half asleep in his gutted cargo van's backseat – tumbling forward with their luggage.

This time, the plantsman was alone. He was puttering through the Sandhills on Highway 91, a mile west of Taylor, when a tall, skinny evergreen - like an Italian cypress, he thought - punctured his periphery. He slammed the brakes. He doubled back. And like he had so many times before, the owner of the Wilke Landscape Center in Columbus knocked on a stranger's door.

"Would you mind?"

Rancher Marlin Britton led the plantsman to that eastern redcedar on the hill, rising like a steeple behind snot-nosed cattle. To Britton, the tree wasn't remarkable. But to Wilke, scrambling up the bank for a closer look, it was a perfect fit for Nebraska's landscaping industry. He took a few 10-inch cuttings, shook Britton's hand and hit the road.

By the early 1980s, Wilke began retailing this new type of tree he called the Taylor juniper, a play on both its origins and its naturally tailored appearance.

In winter 1992 – just a few days before Wilke died – the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum introduced his beloved tree to every licensed nursery in the state.

Thirty years later, the Taylor juniper is ubiquitous across Nebraska, from the town square in Taylor to the capitol grounds in Lincoln; the gates of Wyuka Cemetery to The Gardens at Yanney Park; the track at Hastings College to the belltower at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. They fill the nurseries come spring and sell out come fall – each a perfect clone of that single mother tree in Britton's pasture.

"Every once in a while, I'll drive past one and it's like, 'Oh! There's one of Dad's trees!'" says Alan Britton, Marlin's son. "I don't know how to describe it, but there is an emotional tingle."

***

Taylor, pop. 140, is known for two things: The Villagers, a series of plywood cutouts depicting its earliest citizens in grayscale; and the Taylor juniper, planted on every other property in town, including at the visitor center, the museum, the football field and many homes.

"Now when you go by Taylor, they're everywhere," says Colt Kraus, former chair of the Taylor Community Arboretum. "Because what else do we have?"

Shortly after Wilke took his inaugural cuttings, Alan Britton – knowing his father's cattle often rubbed against it – fenced off the mother tree. But in 1985, Britton retired. The new owners took the fence down. The cattle returned. The tree's needles dropped. And finally, in 2012, she died.

Today, her own skeleton marks the grave, standing like one more Villager, drained of color, on the hill.

“When I saw that I felt sad,” Britton says. “But my understanding is that all of the trees you see now are not offspring of that tree. They are that tree.”

As Wilke knew from the beginning, seeds harvested from the mother tree weren’t likely to bear an exact resemblance. But cuttings carry the same genetic makeup. When he rooted or grafted them, he could make a perfect facsimile: tall, straight as an arrow, rushing skyward.

He planted those first cuttings in the dirt. Most shriveled away. Discouraged, he called Don Cross, who ran one of the Midwest’s only nurseries still grafting trees.

Cross admired the plantsman’s curiosity. He agreed to help, with one caveat: if he succeeded, Cross Nursery could add the Taylor juniper to its catalog, royalty free.

Soon they were grafting 100. Then 300. “Now we grow over 1,000 a year,” Cross says.

They shipped them to Wilke in Columbus. To the statewide arboretum in Lincoln. To Connecticut and Oklahoma and many nurseries in between.

“Today it’s Cross Nursery’s signature tree.”

Every year, roughly 100 go to the Sandhills, their ancestral homeland. Marah Sandoz, the artist behind the Villagers, now sells them for $25 in her gallery on the square.

But the Taylor juniper was no instant bestseller. By the early 2000s, Wilke’s discovery had nearly disappeared from the marketplace.

“None of the Nebraska nurseries were carrying it,” says Bob Henrickson, the statewide arboretum’s assistant director. “Most of them hadn't even heard of it.”

So the arboretum boosted the Taylor juniper’s profile by picking it for its Great Plants for the Great Plains program in 2003.

“I'm pretty proud of that,” Henrickson says. “If I hadn’t done anything, I think it would still be lost in obscurity.”

In the summer of 2009, Taylor followed suit. Armed with a grant from the statewide arboretum, locals revamped the village park. They planted 60 new trees, installed identification tags and two new welcome signs. The whole town, now considered a “landscape steward” site by the statewide arboretum, boasts well over 100 Taylor junipers, its cornerstone tree.

“All of the other small towns around Taylor have things that anchor them to existence,” Kraus says. “Taylor needs that, too.”

***

Taylor may be the “Home of the Taylor Juniper,” as the welcome signs trumpet, but nowhere has it earned a higher profile than Lincoln, 150 miles east, where the trees now complete the capitol grounds. They guard the eastern doors. They stand vigil to the south. On the west, they congregate around the Lincoln Monument, as if yearning for a better look at Honest Abe.

“Call me some time,” says Capitol Administrator Bob Ripley, as if he’s been waiting for this moment. Because if these trees could talk, he says, they’d spin a tale of destiny.

When architect Bertram Goodhue submitted his design for the Nebraska Capitol Building in 1920, he included a number of soaring conifers to accentuate his 15-story limestone tower.

“They were monsters,” Ripley says. "Wider and taller than even the largest Italian cypress I’ve ever seen.”

Goodhue died just two years into the build, but the Capitol Commission hired the state’s first landscape architect to implement his unrealized vision for the grounds. Lincoln native Ernst Herminghaus created a new master plan, replacing Goodhue’s towering imports with the hardier eastern redcedar. To ensure upright growth, Herminghaus painstakingly sheared the branches.

“The problem was we didn't have the skilled gardeners…to continually prune those trees,” Ripley says.

After five years, the commission tore them out. Nearly half a century later, the commission tried Woodward junipers, a new Oklahoma tree variety. They looked great in the beginning, then died. But “lo and behold,” Ripley says, right about that time the state arboretum began promoting an upright juniper – not unlike an Italian cypress – discovered by a curious plantsman puttering through the Sandhills.

“It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect,” Ripley says.

***

Despite its exploding popularity, especially in tight urban spaces, the Taylor juniper’s origin story is hardly complete. Wilke may have discovered it. Britton may have owned it. Cross may have grafted it and the Nebraska State Arboretum may have popularized it. But as one impassioned Loup County native asked in a letter to the editor years ago, “Is it nature’s aberration or his divine creation?”

For thousands of years, wildfires routinely swept the Great Plains, relegating the eastern redcedar to riverbanks and rocky outcrops. Then white settlers arrived. They built homes and planted crops. With so much to protect, they viewed wildfire, in the words of novelist Bess Streeter Aldrich, as one more enemy to vanquish, “the fear of it forever branded in the minds of the settlers.”

No longer nipped in the bud, the eastern redcedar spread its scrappy limbs further into the open prairie, decade after decade, until it was swallowing pastures. Many ecologists now consider the so-called “Green Glacier” the biggest threat to rangeland conservation. Much of the prairie surrounding Taylor is no longer prairie at all.

At some point in the cedar’s long march, nature hiccuped. Exceptionally upright trees began sprouting from the hills. When Wilke first knocked on Britton’s door, the rancher knew of several others growing wild nearby. Today, you can drive the backroads between Taylor and Sargent and spot dozens pricking the horizon, as if pruned by the great Herminghaus himself.

But scientists have yet to map the eastern redcedar genome; there’s no way to efficiently compare their DNA.

So the mystery remains: Is every Taylor-esque juniper somehow a novel mutation or are they simply the offspring of some anonymous arboreal pioneer, what geneticists call “migration.” In Taylor itself, rumors run wild. Some blame radiation from a meteor strike, nuclear drift from the Manhattan Project, an uncanny bolt of lightning.

“I don’t buy it,” says Loren Sandoz, recently retired after 30 years with Loup County High School.

Years ago, his environmental science class experimented with these mysterious trees. Without a formal greenhouse, their attempts at grafting the uprights mostly failed. But they harvested seeds, too. Of the 500 that sprouted, Sandoz planted 100 in one-gallon pots. Three years later, he says, most grew scrappy and loose, like any eastern redcedar. Some were vaguely columnar. But four of the 100 stood fully upright, imitating the mother tree.

It likely proves this is a random mutation, says Donald Lee, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln plant breeding and genetics professor.

Somehow, the gene that normally controls the eastern redcedar’s shape failed to properly replicate. But unlike most trees, the eastern redcedar is sexed: to reproduce, pollen from the male needs to fertilize the female seed cone. As Sandoz’s students discovered, inheriting this rogue gene from the mother alone doesn’t ensure upright growth. But inheriting one from the father, too? Ask a redhead.

“I love a good genetics story,” Lee says.

But the ending hangs in the balance. Should their slender form prove somehow advantageous – say by outcompeting their scrappier peers for sunlight – the Taylor juniper could one day become the new normal in Loup County.

Or they could simply fade away, so many aberrant genes passing like ships in the night.

Loren Sandoz hopes they stick around. He can’t explain how he became the Taylor juniper guy. After an hour shepherding a reporter around his favorite mutant junipers, he rambles past the high school in his ‘98 Chevy, one plaid elbow hanging loose out the window. He points. He grins. “I’ve always admired this one,” he says. And that one came from the pasture. And that’s a certified Taylor by the visitor center. And “that’s one we grafted,” he says.

An aluminum stepladder rattles in the bed as he eulogizes the one that got away.

“It grew from seed, and was so tight and beautiful at three years old, and I wish….”

He peers down the street and into the hills beyond.

“And I wish I’d kept it.”

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