43 strange forest 



world and the symbol ought to mean not "desert" but "tlie 

 Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northern 

 Mexico." To the traveler approaching from the east or 

 the north, the first sight of a saguaro standing sentinel is 

 the announcement, "I have arrived." 



Under the special conditions prevailing where it flour- 

 ishes best — loose rocky soil, low rainfall and high tem- 

 perature — no other growth achieves such a height or such 

 a bulk. Inevitably the saguaro suggests some strange kind 

 of tree, not a succulent plant, and its weight is tremendous. 

 As we said a few minutes ago it may tower fifty feet and 

 may weigh 12,000 pounds. Indeed, fully grown plants are 

 quite commonly not much smaller. Yet they are obvi- 

 ously, in everything except size, very much like other 

 members of the sometimes quite modest cereus subgroup 

 of the cacti. The waxy green skin is tender; the flesh is 

 pulpy and moist, though the moisture contained is too 

 bitter to drink. In spring when a little circle of white 

 flowers opens at the tip of one or more of the arms, the 

 flowers are unmistakably cactus flowers. When the red 

 fruits follow they look like many other cactus fruits, even 

 very much like the familiar prickly pear sometimes sold 

 in fruit stores. 



Yet everything about the saguaro is somehow odd. The 

 seeds, like most cactus seeds, are tiny. The disproportion 

 between the acorn and the oak is not nearly so great. And 

 they grow with extraordinary slowness. After two or tliree 

 years a seedling is only a few millimeters high; after ten 

 years, less than an inch. From then on the rate of growth 

 is variable, but a three-foot specimen may be twenty to 

 fifty years old. In middle age (or shall we say adolescence) 

 it will grow faster, but it will take about a century to 



