188 TREES 



OTHER POD-BEARERS 



The Mesquite 



Prosopis juliflora, DC. 



The mesquite or honey pod is one of the wonderful 

 plants of the arid and semi-arid regions from Col- 

 orado and Utah to Texas and southern California. 

 At best it is a tree sixty feet high along the rivers of 

 Arizona. In the higher and more desert stretches it is 

 stunted to a sprawling shrub, with numerous stems but 

 a few feet high. Its leaves are like those of our honey 

 locust but very much smaller, and the tree furnishes little 

 shade. The bark of the trunk is thick, dark reddish 

 brown, shallowly fissured between scaly ridges. In 

 winter the tree looks dead enough, but the young 

 shoots clothed with tender green bring it to life in early 

 spring, and the greenish fragrant flowers, thickly set in 

 finger-like clusters, appear in successive crops from May to 

 July. These are succeeded by pods four to nine inches 

 long in drooping clusters, each containing ten to twenty 

 beans. 



Not its beauty of leaf and blossom but its usefulness is 

 what makes this tree almost an object of worship to desert 

 dwellers, red men and white. The long fat pods supply 

 Mexicans and Indians with a nutritious food, green or ripe. 

 Cattle feed upon the young shoots and thrive, when other 

 forage is scant or utterly lacking. The fuel problem of the 

 desert is solved by the mesquite in a way that is a great 

 surprise to the newcomer. His sophisticated neighbor 



