Editor’s note: This is the first publication of a weekly column by longtime Bulletin reporter and editor Julie Johnson. Read the column each Saturday in the Community Life section.

You can measure the length of time someone has lived in Central Oregon by the words they use to describe a juniper tree.

Green and glorious, you say? Smelling resinous and fresh? You might be a native, like me, or at least your residency predates the boom, let alone the bust.

Growing up in this region, the juniper scrubland out my back door seemed a green wonderland of twisted trunks and dusty needles. Not the lush, dripping green of my relatives’ landscapes in Western Oregon, to be sure, but our green. My green. The lovely green of the desert.

But I can understand why those from more verdant climes might hesitate to describe a juniper as green. To someone more accustomed to an urban landscape of elms and oaks and birches, not to mention palms, hibiscus or bougainvillea, juniper trees must seem downright drab. And the smell? Somewhere between turpentine and cat pee, I am told, though I find it pleasantly pungent.

It wasn’t until I spent a few years living in Northern California, among ferns and redwoods and mold, that I discovered juniper trees really aren’t green, at least not compared with a rainforest. While visiting my parents in Central Oregon from the lush environs of the Northern California coast, I discovered that my interpretation of the palette of the High Desert had changed. The junipers suddenly seemed so gray, the landscape so muted.

It took only a few months after moving back to Bend in 1999 for my internal color sensors to reboot, and juniper trees once again represented the subtle verdancy of the High Desert. They may lack the brooding darkness of ponderosas and the showy flowers of rabbitbrush or sage. But junipers are the workaday tree here, as faded and worn as a good pair of jeans.

Which brings me to this observation: Juniper trees are to Central Oregon’s landscape what its people are to its cities.

If you take your eyes off the post-card mountains and the sparkling lakes of our region, you’ll find armies of junipers quietly lining the landscape, holding down the dust with their homey familiarity. Likewise, if you ignore for a moment the “quaint” ubiquity of Craftsman-style subdivisions and the proliferation of celebrity athletes, you’ll find thousands of regular folk going about their lives in thousands of ways, large and small.

Juniper trees work quiet miracles under the canopies of their spiky needles: Did you know each cluster of juniper berries is actually two years’ worth of the tree’s female cones? Rub off the glaucous, powder-blue coating and you’ll find green and purple berries together on the same branch. The purple ones are ripe, and are probably being eaten by robins and Steller’s jays as we speak; the green berries are this year’s unripe crop of cones.

The people of Central Oregon, too, perform amazing feats of everyday life. They raise their children. They play outside. They work. They weep. They pray.

They laugh and love and live.

Like our beloved juniper trees, they define Central Oregon.