IN CALIFORNIA 67 



bling huge forks with clumsy prongs, others with 

 well grown crowns that were fairly symmetrical. 



"So that's the desert's idea of a tree," I re- 

 marked for the benefit of my neighbor, a quiet, 

 weather-beaten man, with a close-cropped gray 

 beard. He, too, was watching them with apparent 

 interest. 



"That's one of its ideas," he responded smilingly. 

 "You perhaps don't know the desert?" 



I confessed my ignorance, and my companion 

 went on: 



"They are tree yuccas, 1 or yucca cactus as our 

 desert dwellers sometimes inaccurately term them. 

 The species is peculiar to the Mojave Desert, prin- 

 cipally in California but extending eastward to 

 Southern Utah. The unbranched trunks are the 

 saplings. When they are ten or twelve feet high, 

 they begin to branch out, adding a few limbs year 

 by year until they get a pretty good crown, as you 

 see, and reach a height of twenty-five or thirty feet, 

 when they rest on their laurels. The upper leaves 

 on the branch stand upright, but as growth pro- 

 ceeds, they droop over; and when they die they are 

 pressed point downward against the bark. That 



i Yucca arborescens, or brevifolia, of the botanists. Fremont re- 

 ported the existence of the strange tree in 1844, though it was not un- 

 til 1874 that its flowers were collected by Dr. C. C. Parry, and a com- 

 plete description made possible. 



