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. 
Siem ak A noble plant, with no trunk, but send- 
Spanish Bayonet 129g up a magnificent shaft of flowers, 
Yucca Whipplei from five to fifteen feet tall, springing 
White from a huge, symmetrical bunch of dagger- 
Spring, summer Jie 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 
aspect, but with a weird sort of beauty, 
looming black against the pale desert 
Joshua Tree 
Tree Yucca 
Cleistoyticca ; ; 
arboréscens landscape, witha great, thick, rough trunk, 
(Yucca) fifteen to thirty feet high, and a few thick, 
Greenish-white ontorted branches, stretching out like 
Spring, summer 
Cal. Ariz. Utah * giant’s arms and pointing ominously 
across the sandy waste. The branches 
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