USEFUL WILD PLANTS 



{Prosopis juliflora, DC, and its varieties) abundant 

 throughout the arid region on both sides of the 

 Mexican border. It is, indeed, the characteristic 

 tree of the Southwestern deserts, giving to those 

 gray wastes touches of living 

 color very grateful to the eyes 

 starving for the sight of a really 

 vivid green. The pods, in shape 

 and size resembling string 

 beans, are produced abundantly 

 in drooping clusters, which, 

 ripening in late summer, become 

 lemon yellow. The juicy pulp, 

 in which the hard, bony seeds 

 are embedded, is exceedingly 

 sweet, containing, according to 

 Havard, more than half its 

 Mesquit weight of assimilable nutritive 



(Prosopis juliflora) 



properties, of which sugar is 

 in the proportion of from twenty-five to thirty per 

 cent. All stock thrives on the pods, and it is on 

 this account rather than on any appeal to his own 

 stomach that the white man's regard for them is 

 grounded ; but upon the Indian, who has ever a sweet 

 tooth, they have a strong claim as human food. 

 There is before me, as I write, a jar of coarse mesquit 



62 



