LILY FAMILY. Liliaceae. 



There are several kinds of Yucca, natives of North and 

 Central America; large plants, with dagger-like leaves, 

 usually with long, thread-like fibers along the margins; 

 flowers with bracts, nodding in a terminal cluster, somewhat 

 bell-shaped, with six, thickish, white divisions; stamens 

 short, with thickened filaments and small anthers; ovary 

 with three united stigmas; capsule containing many, flat, 

 black seeds. The flowers are pollinated by a little white 

 moth, which lays its eggs in the ovary, but previously 

 gathers pollen from many flowers and pushes it against 

 the stigma after the eggs have been laid. 



A noble plant, with no trunk, but send- 

 Our Lord's Candle . ' . , ' _ 



Spanish Bayonet m S U P a magnificent shaft of flowers, 

 Yucca Whipplei from five to fifteen feet tall, springing 

 Whi te from a huge, symmetrical bunch of dagger- 



Spring, summer Hk bluish-green leaves. The cluster is 

 Cal., Ariz. 



composed of hundreds of waxy, cream- 

 colored blossoms, sometimes tinged with purple, two 

 inches across, crowded so closely together along the upper 

 part of the stalk that the effect is a great, solid mass of 

 bloom, three feet long. The white filaments are swollen, 

 tipped with pale-yellow anthers; the pistil cream-color, 

 with green stigmas. The large, white bracts are stiff and 

 coarse, something like parchment, folded back so that the 

 pinkish stalk is ornamented with a series of white triangles, 

 symmetrically arranged. A hillside covered with hun- 

 dreds of these magnificent spires of bloom, towering above 

 the chaparral, is a wonderful sight. After they have 

 blossomed, the tall, white stalks remain standing for 

 some time, so that the hills look as if they had been 

 planted with numbers of white wands. 



The genus Cleistoyucca resembles Yucca, but the divi- 

 sions of the flower are very thick and there is no style. 



A tree, grotesque and forbidding in 



as P ect but with a weird sort of beauty, 

 Cleistoyucca looming black against the pale desert 



arbor escens landscape, with a great, thick, rough trunk, 



(Yucca) fifteen to thirty feet high, and a few thick, 



Greenish-white contorte ^ branches, stretching out like 

 Spring, summer . . . 



Cal., Ariz., Utah a 8 iant s arms and pointing ominously 



across the sandy waste. The branches 



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