YUCCA-PALM. TREE-YUCCA. JOSHUA-TREE.
Yucca arborescens, Trelease. Lily Family.
Scraggly trees; thirty, or forty feet high; with trunks one or two feet in diameter. Leaves.—Eight inches long; crowded; rigid; spine-tipped; serrulate; the older ones reflexed and sun-bleached, the younger ashy-green. Flowers.—In sessile, ovate panicles, terminating the branches. Panicles several inches long. Perianth.—Narrowly campanulate; eighteen to thirty lines long. Fruit.—Two or three inches long. (Otherwise as Y. Mohavensis.) Hab.—Southwestern Utah to the Mojave Desert.
The traveler crossing the Mojave Desert upon the railroad has his curiosity violently aroused by certain fantastic tree forms that whirl by the car windows. These are the curious Joshua-trees of the Mormons, which are called in California tree-yucca or yucca-palm. A writer in "The Land of Sunshine" thus aptly characterizes them: "Weird, twisted, demoniacal, the yuccas remind me of those enchanted forests described by Dante, whose trees were human creatures in torment. In twisted groups or standing isolated, they may readily be imagined specters of the plains."
Mr. Sargent tells us that, though found much to the eastward of our borders, it abounds in the Mojave Desert, where it attains its largest size and forms a belt of gaunt, straggling forest several miles in width along the desert's western rim.
Its flowers appear from March to May, but are not at all attractive, on account of their soiled white color and disagreeable, fetid odor. "The unopened panicles form conspicuous cones eight to ten inches long, covered with closely overlapping white scales, often flushed with purple at the apex."
The seeds are gathered and used by the omnivorous Indians, who grind them into meal, which they eat either raw or cooked as a mush. The wood furnishes an excellent material for paper pulp, and some years ago an English company established a mill at Ravenna, in Soledad Pass, for its manufacture. It is said that several editions of a London journal were printed upon it, but owing to the great cost of its manufacture, the enterprise had to be abandoned.
The light wood is put to many uses now, and in the curio bazaars of the south it plays a conspicuous part, made into many small articles. By sawing round and round the trunk of the tree, thin sheets of considerable size are procured. A sepia reproduction of one of the old missions upon the ivory-tinted ground of one of these combines sentiment and novelty in a very pretty souvenir. Surgeons find these same sheets excellent for splints, as they are unyielding in one direction and pliable in the other; and orchardists wrap them around the bases of their trees to protect them from the gnawing of rabbits.