210 Rambles of a Botanist in New Mexico. ` [April, 
of them, a trunk so clothed in light ash-gray that at a little dis- 
tance it looks almost precisely like the trunk of a white oak. 
Mexicans, much averse to the hard work of swinging an axe, 
never undertake the operation of cutting down even a medium 
sized tree of any sort; they prefer, when wood is wanted, to 
climb the trunk and cut off the branches; thus in the vicinity of 
any ‘Mexican village among these hills, one sees instead of low 
stumps, trunks standing ten or fifteen feet high simply divested 
of their arms or branches. Where white oaks and this juniper 
had grown side by side it was hardly possible to distinguish be- 
tween them in the absence of the branches so closely does the 
one imitate the other as to the appearance of the bark. I took 
the measurement of a vigorously growing not old-looking speci- 
men of Funiperus pachyphlea and found the circumference of its 
trunk, at three feet from the ground, fifteen feet and three inches. 
The height of the tree was a little more than forty feet. The 
berries of this tree are light-green with a bluz bloom when 
mature, and are full four times the size of ordinary juniper ber- 
ries. They are sweet and not unpleasant to the taste, and as an 
article of food seem to be greatly enjoyed by various birds and 
mammals, and by the Indians. Among the small trees of the 
region the mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus parvifolius Nutt.) is 
valuable on account of its very hard wood, for nearly all the rest 
of the native woods, even that of oaks, is light and brittle. The 
New Mexican locust (Robinia neomexicana Gray) is another 
small tree, or sometimes a mere shrub, remarkable not from any 
utilitarian point of view but for its great beauty when loaded with 
its heavy pendant racemes of rose-purple flowers. No other 
orth American locust is so highly ornamental. But perhaps 
the most beautiful flowering tree of this section and of the whole 
south-western country is the one known to the Americans by the 
common name of desert willow (Chilopsis linearis DC.). The 
appellation sounds paradoxical surely, for from the ancient a 
Hebrew poets down to the present generation, all, even superfi- © 
cial observers, know that the place for willows is not in deserts, 
but “by the water courses.” And the tree in question is not M- 
deed a willow, though the Mexicans have made the same mistake aS 
we, for they call it the mimdre, which is the Spanish word for i 
osier. But with its black bark, like that of some species of w 
_ low, and its long narrow leaves clothing slender and gracefully 7 
LEER TETA) 
