THE NEWSPAPER PLANT.
You are to be told in this month's St. Nicholas, I hear, about a curious "lace-leaf," a "vegetable necktie," and a "caricature plant." If so, this is a good time for me to show you a curiosity called the newspaper plant, which the Little School-ma'am described the other day to the young folk of the Red School House.
It seems that in certain far-away countries called New Mexico and Arizona, there are great tracts of desolate desert lands, where the very hills seem destitute of life and beauty, and where the earth is shriveled from centuries of terrible heat. And in these desert-tracts grow a curious, misshapen, grotesque and twisted plant that seems more like a goblin tree than a real one.
Of all the trees in the world, you would imagine this to be the most outcast and worthless—so meager a living does it obtain from the waste of sand and gravel in which it grows. And yet this goblin tree is now being sought after and utilized in one of the world's greatest industries—an industry that affects the daily needs of civilization, and is of especial importance to every girl and boy who reads the pages of St. Nicholas.
Those wise folk, the botanists, call our goblin tree by its odd Indian name of the "Yucca" palm.
THE YUCCA PALM.
This plant of the desert for a long time was considered valueless. But not long ago it was discovered that the fiber of the Yucca could be made into an excellent paper.[E] And now one of the great English dailies, the London Telegraph, is printed upon paper made from this goblin tree. Indeed, the Telegraph has purchased a large plantation in Arizona, merely for the purpose of cultivating this tree, and manufacturing paper from it. So, you see, the Yucca is now a newspaper plant.