BIGNONIACEZ. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 95 
CHILOPSIS LINEARIS. 
Desert Willow. 
Chilopsis linearis, De Candolle, Prodr. ix. 227 (1845). — 217.— Hemsley, Bot. Biol. Am. Cent. ii. 494. — Rusby, 
Coville, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. iv. 174 (Bot. Death Bull. Torrey Bot. Club, ix. 54.— Sargent, Forest Trees 
Valley Hxped.). N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 116. — Coulter, Contrib. 
Bignonia linearis, Cavanilles, Icon. iii. 35, t. 269 (1794). U. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 319 (Man. Pl. W. Texas). 
Chilopsis saligna, D. Don, Edinburgh New Phil. Jour.ix. Chilopsis glutinosa, Engelmann, Wislizenus Memoir of 
261 (1823). — Don, Gen. Syst. iv. 228. — Dietrich, Syn. a Tour to Northern Mexico (Senate Doc. 1848, Bot. 
ili. 566. — Gray, Brewer & Watson Bot. Cal. i. 587; Syn. Appx. 94). 
Fl. N. Am. ii. pt. i. 320. — Rothrock, Wheeler’s Rep. vi. 
Chilopsis linearis is a tree, twenty or thirty feet in height, with a trunk usually more or less 
reclining, often hollow, and sometimes a foot in diameter, and slender upright branches which form a 
narrow head ; or often a straggling shrub. The bark of the trunk is an eighth to a quarter of an inch 
in thickness, dark brown, and divided into broad branching ridges broken on the surface into small 
thick plate-like scales. The branches, when they first appear, are glabrous, glutinous, or covered with 
dense tomentum, and during their first season are light chestnut-brown, later becoming darker and 
tinged with red, or sometimes ashy gray. The leaves, which unfold in the early spring, and fall during 
the following winter, are six to twelve inches long, and from a quarter to a third of an inch wide. The 
flowers appear in early summer in racemes three or four inches in length, and continue to open for 
several months in succession; they are an inch and a half long and about an inch and a quarter across 
the expanded lobes of the limb of the corolla. The fruit, which ripens in the autumn, hangs on the 
branches during the winter ; it is seven to twelve inches long, and a quarter of an inch thick in the 
middle. The seed is a third of an inch long and an eighth of an inch broad. 
Chilopsis linearis is a common inhabitant of the banks of streams, and depressions in the desert, 
growing in dry gravelly porous soil, and is distributed from the neighborhood of Laredo in southwestern 
Texas through western Texas, southern New Mexico, Arizona, southern Utah and Nevada, San Diego 
County, California, and the states of northern Mexico. 
Its long drooping crowded bright green leaves make Chilopsis linearis a conspicuous object in 
the desert, which it enlivens with its lovely delicate flowers, exhaling at night the odor of violets. It 
is occasionally cultivated in the gardens of the southern states * and in those of northern Mexico, where 
it grows to its largest size. 
1 Reverchon, Garden and Forest, v. 615. 
