At Palm Springs with the Sierra Club 



Julia Ellen Rogers 



Author of The Tree Book, The Shell Book, Trees That Every Child 



Should Know 



I wish every reader of The Nature-Study Review could sit 

 here with me on this glorious, sunshiny spring morning, and gaze 

 down over the rocky side of Palm Springs Canyon, see Mt. San 

 Jacinto looming white over our shoulders, deeper hid in snows 

 than for many years, its melting coat feeding the noisy stream that 

 tumbles over the rocks in a tortuous course away down there in the 

 canyon bed. About 100 members of the Sierra Club are scattered 

 about, spending this Palm Sunday (as who could better?) among 

 stately desert palms (Washingtonia filifera) in their native haunts. 

 Like an avenue, winds the course of the stream, with sentinel 

 palms lining both sides, each on a tall stem, crowned with green 

 leaves in a globular head, each short-stemmed and with round 

 blade, of the usual "palm-leaf", pleated pattern. Below the 

 green crown, the leaves of past years hang brown and dying, 

 thatching the upper trunk with their overlapping blades. Some 

 are apparently twins, crowding as they have grown to adult size. 

 The tallest are slender, the stockiest trunks are often almost 

 covered to the ground with the thatch of persistent, pendant 

 leaves. The young trees are as big-headed as their parents. 

 It takes years of growth to lift these youngsters up and up. One 

 hundred and fifty years old the "wise guy" says the oldest trees 

 probably are. Nobody can prove him inaccurate in his state- 

 ment. 



The companions of the palms down there are willows and poplars 

 brave in new spring foliage. Back in the sloping incline of the 

 valley, there is good soil, the wash of the shaly foot-hills, and on it 

 are thickets of bright green creosote bush showing abundant yellow 

 flowers. Then comes the desert, an abrupt face of exposed strata; 

 then another, and another till the eye reaches the skyline of the 

 rocky ridge that keeps guard over the canyon of the palms. 



With my field glass I look up the "avenue" of palms, to where 

 the canyon narrows and its head is lost around a curve. In the 

 opposite direction, the gateway opens into the broad valley, still 

 desert in its vegetation, that stretches away northwest toward 



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