PALMA. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 47 
WASHINGTONIA FILAMENTOSA. 
Desert Palm. Fan Palm. 
Leaves light green, their petioles stout and elongated. 
Washingtonia filamentosa, 0. Kuntze, Rev. Gen. Pl. ii. Pritchardia filifera, Linden, JJ. Hort. xxiv. 32, 107 
737 (1891). (1877). 
Brahea dulcis (?), Cooper, Smithsonian Rep. 1860, 342 Washingtonia filifera, H. Wendland, Bot. Zeit. xxxvii. 
(not Martius) (1861). 68 (1879). — Brewer & Watson, Bot. Cal. ii. 211, 485. — 
Pritchardia filamentosa, H. Wendland, Bot. Zeit. xxxiv. Sargent, Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 
807 (1876). — Fenzi, Bull. Soc. Tose. Ort. i. 116, f. 217. — Sprenger, Bull. Soc. Tosc. Ort. xiv. 319, £. 37. 
A tree, occasionally seventy-five feet in height, with a trunk sometimes fifty or sixty feet tall, from 
two to three feet in diameter, covered with a thick light red-brown slightly scaly rind, and clothed 
layer over layer with a thick thatch of dead pendent leaves descending in a regular cone from the living 
crown sometimes nearly to the ground.’ The living leaves, which vary from forty to sixty in number, 
are light green, slightly tomentose on the folds, five or six feet in length and four or five feet in width, 
and are borne on petioles from four to six feet long, about two inches broad at the apex, where they 
widen slightly into the lgulas, which are about four inches in length and cut irregularly into long 
narrow lobes, about five inches wide at the base, where they dilate into the sheaths, which are sixteen 
or eighteen inches long and twelve or fourteen inches wide, and are armed with broad thin large and 
small straight or hooked spines. The flower-clusters are from ten to twelve feet in length, three or 
four being produced each year from the axils of upper leaves, the shghtly fragrant flowers opening late 
in May or early in June; they are at first erect and spreading, becoming pendulous as the fruit matures, 
glabrous and hght green; the stems and branches are compressed and slightly wing-margined toward 
the base, slender and terete above, and divided into three or four primary branches bearing elongated 
pendulous secondary branches furnished with numerous long densely flowered branchlets, the upper 
bemg simple and erect, and the lower spreading and paniculate; the outer spathe which incloses the 
panicle in the bud is narrow, elongated, and glabrous; and those of the secondary branches are 
coriaceous, yellow tinged with brown, laciniate at the apex, the upper being lorate and coated on the 
margins with loose pale caducous tomentum. The fruit, which is produced in great profusion, ripens 
in September, and is a third of an inch in length. The seed is a quarter of an inch long and an eighth 
of an inch thick. 
Washingtoma filamentosa, which is the largest of the Palms of the United States, sometimes 
forms extensive open groves” or small isolated clumps, and grows in wet usually alkaline soil along the 
eastern borders of the depression in the Colorado Desert, which an land sea once filled, following the 
line of connection between this depression and the Gulf of California into Lower California, and 
sometimes extending for several miles up the canons of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains, 
a small grove in White Water Cafion on the eastern slope of the San Bernardino Mountains marking 
the western and northern limits of its range.’ 
1 This thatch of dead leaves makes the best possible protection desert, and the vitality of this Palm is shown by its ability to with- 
for the trunk from the burning heat and drying winds of the stand the effects of such constant abuse, and the removal of its 
desert. Its inflammable material, however, is easily kindled by protective covering. (See S. B. Parish, Garden and Forest, iii. 51.) 
accidental fires, and is usually burned off by Indians in order to * Garden and Forest, viii. 472, £. 65. 
facilitate the ascent of the trunk to gather the fruit. The dead 3 §. B. Parish, Zoé, iv. 349. 
leaves have thus been burned from nearly all the trees in the 
