Cook: Olneya Beans 



323 



though somewhat astringent. The pods 

 are not Hmited to one or two seeds, as 

 the works of Gray and other botanists 

 would indicate, nor is the tree of very 

 slow growth as commonly supposed, 

 from its behavior under extreme desert 

 •conditions. In short, Olneya is a tree 

 that may be found worthy of cultiva- 

 tion, in spite of the fact that it is not 

 planted or even allowed to survive 

 around any of the southwestern settle- 

 ments. 



It seems remarkable that the produc- 

 tion of edible beans by Olneya was not 

 the first fact to be recorded, or at 

 least one of the first to attract attention, 

 but this feature of the tree has remained 

 practically unknown, even among those 

 who have lived long in the southwest. 

 One reason may be that the beans 

 ripen about the first of August when 

 even botanists and explorers avoid the 

 hot deserts. Emory passed through 

 the Gila Valley in November, 1846. 

 Bigelow's specimens of Olneya were 

 collected in northern Arizona in Feb- 

 ruary, 1854, and are said by Torrey 

 to be "in fruit only," no doubt the 

 ■empty pods of the previous season. 

 Bigelow states that the Mexicans who 

 accompanied the Whipple Expedition, 

 and who doubtless joined it in New 

 Mexico, were not acquainted with the 

 tree nor with the name tesota. It 

 seems not impossible that the tree at 

 first was confused with the mesquite or 

 the "cat's claw" acacia, the latter 

 also said to have been called tesota. 

 The word tezoatl appears in Simeon's 

 Aztec dictionary as the name of a shrub 

 •of the hot lands, the leaves of which 

 are used to make a dye, while texotia 

 ■or texotli is an Aztec word for a blue 

 color. In the Pima language the tree 

 is called haitkam, according to Russell. 



The first Olneya beans that came to 

 my attention in October, 1916, were in 

 the hands of a venerable prospector 

 living near the abandoned town of 

 Picacho on the California side of the 

 Colorado River, about 30 miles north 

 of Yuma. A stock of the beans had 

 been collected for eating and to make a 

 beverage that was compared to choco- 

 late. The old nrospector's "native 



peanuts" were remembered in July, 

 1918, on seeing abundant crops of pods 

 on many of the Olneya trees in the 

 deserts around Sacaton, in south-central 

 Arizona, and as the beans ripened many 

 differences were noted, some of practical 

 interest from the standpoint of cultiva- 

 tion. 



No tw^o trees seem to produce exactly 

 the same kind of beans. Usually the 

 difference between beans of neighboring 

 trees were not merely appreciable, but 

 obvious, and comparable to those that 

 distinguish cultivated varieties in other 

 genera of the pea family. Correspond- 

 ing differences were noted in the pods 

 and in the characters and behavior of 

 seedlings of the same parent tree. 

 Many writers assume that wild species 

 normally are uniform, and that diver- 

 sities among cultivated plants are in- 

 duced by conditions of domestication or 

 by hybridization. But Olneya is a mono- 

 typic genus, and individual diversity 

 or heterism, instead of uniformity, 

 appears as the normal condition among 

 the wild trees growing in their native 

 deserts. 



Though only one bean in a pod is the 

 rule on some trees, it usually is possible 

 to find some pods with at least two or 

 three beans. Many trees have pods 

 with several seeds, and some are dis- 

 tinctly large-podded, to the extent of 

 nearly 13 cm. in length and 10 to 12 

 mm. in width, in the dry state. The 

 largest pods had nine fully developed 

 beans and two abortive, indicating 

 that pods with eleven beans or more 

 are sometimes produced. The number 

 of seeds is a practical consideration, 

 since gathering beans from trees with 

 only single-seeded or two-seeded pods 

 is much more difficult than from those 

 that have pods with several beans. 

 The color of the young pods is a light 

 yellowish or brownish-green, sometimes 

 mottled with red, as the pods of the 

 Arizona mesquite often are. The color 

 darkens to light coffee brown as the 

 pods dry and shrivel. 



Other differences between individual 

 trees are in the proportioning of the 

 pods to the beans. If the pods are 

 ample so that there is no crowding, the 



