LILIACER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 13 
YUCCA MACROCARPA. 
Spanish Dagger. 
LzEAvVEs flat, dark green. Fruit long-beaked. 
Yucca macrocarpa, Coville, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. iv. Yucca baccata, Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census 
202 (Bot. Death Valley Exped.) (1893). — Sargent, Gar- U. S. ix. 219 (in part) (not Torrey) (1884). — Hemsley, 
den and Forest, ix. 104. Bot. Biol. Am. Cent. iii. 370 (in part). 
Yucca baccata, var. macrocarpa, Torrey, Bot. Mex. ‘Yucca filifera, Trelease, Rep. Missouri Bot. Gard. iii. 162, 
Bound. Surv. 222 (1858). (in part) (not Chabaud) (1892). 
Yucca baccata, 6 australis, Engelmann, Trans. St. Louis Yucca australis, Trelease, Rep. Missouri Bot. Gard. iv. 
Acad. iii. 44 (in part) (1873).— Watson, Proc. Am. Acad. 190, t. 4,5 (excl. hab. Parras) (1893). — Coulter, Contrib. 
xiv. 252 (in part). — Baker, Jour. Linn. Soc. xviii. 229 U. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 436 (Man. Pl. W. Texas). 
(in part). 
A tree, often forty feet in height, with a trunk sometimes two feet in diameter above the broad 
abruptly enlarged base, from which hard tough roots a third of an inch in thickness and covered with 
bright red-brown lustrous bark descend deep into the soil, and simple, or divided into several short 
branches ; frequently smaller, and until ten or fifteen years old clothed from the ground with erect 
living leaves. Near the base the stems of old trees are covered with dark reddish brown bark from a 
third to a half of an inch in thickness and broken on the surface into small thin loose scales, and above 
are protected by a thick thatch of the pendent dry leaves of many seasons. The leaves are lanceolate, 
rigid, and from two and a half to four feet in length; they are abruptly contracted above the 
conspicuously thickened dark red and lustrous base, which is six or seven inches broad, and then 
gradually widen to above the middle, where they are from two and a half to three inches in breadth ; 
they are flat on the upper surface, thickened and rounded on the lower toward the base, tipped 
with short stout dark spines, smooth, and clear dark green, their margins, which at first are brown 
and entire, breaking later into numerous stout gray or brown fibres, short and spreading near the apex 
of the leaf and long and more remote toward the base, where they form a thick cobweb-like mass 
between the leaves. The flowers, which in Texas appear in April, hang on thin drooping pedicels 
from three quarters of an inch to nearly three inches long, forming dense many-flowered glabrous 
panicles from three to four feet in length, with elongated pendulous branches and short peduncles ; 
the bracts are ovate, acute or acuminate, mucronate at the apex, white, thick and leathery; often from 
ten to fourteen inches long and from three to four inches broad at the base of the panicle, they 
decrease in size upward, those at the base of its branches being from four to six inches long and about 
an inch wide, and those at the base of the pedicels, which do not fall until after the flowers, from an 
inch to an inch and a half long, a quarter of an inch wide, and membranaceous. The perigone is 
about two and a half inches in length, with obovate thin concave acute white waxy segments, narrowed 
at both ends and united at the base into a short tube, those of the outer rank bemg not more than 
half as wide as those of the inner rank and about two thirds as long. The stamens are much shorter 
than the ovary, with slender filaments pilose above the middle with short rigid hairs, and abruptly 
dilated and clavate at the apex. The ovary is sessile, conspicuously ridged, light yellow, marked with 
large pale raised lenticels, and gradually narrowed above into an elongated slender style deeply three- 
lobed at the apex. The fruit, which ripens in early summer, is indehiscent, shghtly or not at all 
angled, abruptly contracted at the apex into a longer or shorter slender hooked beak, from three to 
four inches long and from an inch to an inch and a half thick, light orange-colored and lustrous 
