LET’S KNOW SOME TREES 31 
ne) The indigo bush, perhaps better called “tree pea” and often 
known as smoke tree because of the smoky-grey color of its slender, 
drooping branchlets and leaves, sometimes grows into a bushy, many- 
branched tree from 4 to 25 feet high. It somewhat suggests the 
tamarisk and is found on the Colorado Desert, a small forest of them 
being along the road from Palm Springs to Indio. 
THE MADRONE 
We Californians boast of 
having the biggest conifer- 
ous trees in the world, and 
of growing the biggest 
pumpkins—even of having 
the tallest and finest tar- 
weed. But not all of us 
happen to know that we 
might also boast of the 
greatest heather. The Cali- 
; fornia madrone, or ma- 
droha, is a member of the 
heath family; each white 
blossom of the great clus- 
ters one sees away Up over- 
head is an urn, as is usual 
in the blooms of the heath 
family, and what a great 
heath it is—20 to 125 feet 
high, with a trunk 6 inches 
to 5 feet in diameter. 
While found only on the 
Pacific coast, it is not con- 
fined to California by any 
means, occurring in Brit- 
ish Columbia, Washington, 
and Oregon as well. In 
California it grows as far 
south as the South Fork 
of the Tuolumne River in 
the Stanislaus National 
F172645 
¢ Forest, in the Sierra Ne- Figure 20.—Joshua tree (Yucca arborescens) 
. vada, and in the Coast 
cS Range canyons as far south, though rarely, as San Bernardino 
= County. : 
i This beautiful evergreen tree, with smooth, terracotta colored bark 
i: (darker and rougher in the lower part of the trunk of old trees), and 
S its deep-green 4 to 6 inch smooth-edged leaves, brilliantly glossy 
above and somewhat fuzzy underneath, is common in Santa Cruz 
County, in Sonoma, and in Mendocino. The Ukiah (Mendocino 
County) parks are full of it. The town camp ground has many 
wonderful specimens, and a large majority of the homes have one to 
half a dozen of these trees in their grounds, so that the town seems 
set in a grove of madrones, white and fragrant in blooming season 
and brilliant with round red berries in November or December. Each 
