Every year, cedar fever descends on Central Texas, and with it comes a deep-seated, Texas-sized hate for the mountain cedar.
“Cedar fever is not just any allergy,” wrote Patricia Sharpe in a 1986 issue of Texas Monthly. “It’s a scourge, a plague that smites the just and the unjust who have the misfortune to live anywhere in a broad strip of Central Texas that stretches from the Red River to the Rio Grande.”
But red eyes and a scratchy throat aren’t the only reasons many Texans hate this specific tree. Some say the cedar hogs water, depleting our aquifers and outcompeting more desirable trees such as the live oak. Ranchers view it as a noxious weed, an opportunistic plant that has invaded our picturesque Texas grasslands… Read more from Reporting Texas