2 



THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



of the Cleveland Xational Forest Reserve, and the interest 

 felt by the local forester in maintaining and increasing the 

 unique woodland, was evidenced at the time of our visit by 

 this terse notice penciled on a post of the wire fence that 

 extended across the canyon's mouth : "Close the gate. I 

 don't want cattle to get in the young palms." 



The first impression that forces itself upon the visitor to 

 this canyon is that wherever he is, he is certainly not in the 

 United States, so effectually do these wild palms give the 

 stamp of strangeness and remoteness to the scenery. The 

 lower slopes of San Jacinto's desert side are as barren as the 

 desert itself — devoid of vegetation save a sparse growth of 

 xerophytic plants that live with slight regard to moisture. 

 The canyon sides, therefore, instead of being clad with cling- 

 ing- trees and verdant shrubs, as one naturally expects in a 

 canyon, are austere uplifts of scattered, sun-burnt rock whose 

 expanses are unrelieved save here and there by a bulky cactus 

 or a clump of those unhonored plants that desert dwellers 

 lump together indiscriminately as sagebrush and greasewood. 



From the vantage ground of these treeless sides, one sees, 

 far down in the bed of the gorge where the stream ripples 

 along, the winding procession of the stately palms issuing by 

 hundreds from the fastnesses of the mountain's rifted sides, 

 gathering numbers as the canyon widens, and disappearing 

 finally in the pitiless maw of the all consuming desert. In the 

 sunlight thf^ir rounded crowns, lifted on slender bare trunks 

 to the height of SO or 90 feet above the ground, glisten and 

 nod like the plumed helmets of an army of ancient days. Don 

 Quixote would surely have taken them for some giant host 

 bound under a magic spell. Indeed one soon begins to wonder 

 if an enchantment is not upon the whole place — so unlike the 

 customary American sort of scene is it, so shut out from the 

 world of today, so palpable is the silence, so unreal that pul- 

 sating distance, where, beyond the canyon's mouth, the dim 



