Tenitorial Seal of Utah. 
ROCKY MOUNTAINS- 
VEGETABLE FORMS, STRANGE AND CURIOUS. 
BY J. E. JOHNSON, ST. GEORGE, UTAH. 
ATURE is consistent, bountiful, and honest, and as a rule very impartial. 
Her gifts are seldom collective, or all lavished upon any one section of the 
universe, hut are widespread. The wooded and prairie countries possess 
many advantages and beauties, and the valleys, mountains and deserts too 
are not left in sadness and destitute, but has much to sustain life, — to com- 
mand admiration, and from which to found fortunes. Our valleys offer rich 
soils for horticulture ; our mountains yield minerals, metals and chemicals in nearly 
every known variety, as well as choice timber, flowers delightful and fragrant, 
nuts, fruits, marble and precious stones, and even the arid plains and deserts pro- 
duce a new world of the strange, the useful and lovely, and altogether they are a 
study of the grandest magnificence beyond the power of pen to paint. A person 
passing over our deserts is impressed with the utter desolation around, the vast 
distance, the burning sand, absence of moisture, the thorny, leafless cactus, agaves, 
yuccas, and starveling, stinted shrubs. It would seem to the unpracticed mind 
that were a person lost upon these desert plains, a rescue from death would be hope- 
less; and yet these ugly cactus are composed of three-fourths water, the sere shrubs 
bear a delicious berry, the jSpiny Yucca bears an edible fruit resembling a banana. 
The cactus in various forms produce a fruit often delicious : the agave bulb, when 
properly roasted, gives a sugary, nutritious food ; many herbs produce foliage that 
is edible and good, either raw or cooked ; insignificant weeds and grasses bear nutri- 
tious seeds and bulbous roots, good for food. The Calochortus Californica (Indian 
name, SegoJ, produces a lovely flower, and its bulb in one of the greatest vegetable 
delicacies. Thousands have been saved from death upon these cactus deserts, by 
these wonderful provisions of nature given to a region apparently destitute of all 
earth’s blessings. 
The Cereus Gigantea is one of nature’s grandest accomplishments in botany. They 
often rear their heads twenty or thirty feet, straight or with projecting arms like a 
mighty giant, guarding the treasures of the lone desert, or the passes in the moun- 
tains. The Yucca Brevifolia or Needle Palm, is another magnificent specimen in 
botany, rising from ten to twenty feet, often with umbrageous head, and the numer- 
