About the same time that the beautiful leaves of the buckeye are emerging from their wrappings, we notice in the woods a shrub which has just put forth its clusters of bright-green leaves from buds all along its slender twigs. Amid their delicate green hang short clusters of greenish-white flowers. These blossoms have a delicious bitter fragrance, redolent of all the tender memories of the springtime.

[WOOD ANEMONE—Anemone quinquefolia.]

This shrub is usually mistaken for a wild plum; and the illusion is still further assisted when the little drupes, like miniature plums, begin to ripen and hang in yellow and purple clusters amid the matured leaves.

WILD DATE. SPANISH BAYONET.

Yucca Mohavensis, Sargent. Lily Family.

Trunk.—Usually simple; rarely exceeding fifteen feet high; six or eight inches in diameter; naked, or covered with refracted dead leaves, or clothed to the ground with the living leaves. Leaves.—Linear-lanceolate; one to three feet long; one or two inches wide; rigid; margins at length bearing coarse recurved threads. Flowers.—In short-stemmed or sessile, distaff-shaped panicles, a foot or two long; pedicels eventually drooping, twelve to eighteen lines long. Perianth.—Broadly campanulate. Segments.—Six; thirty lines long; six to twelve wide. Stamens.—Six; six to nine lines long; filaments white, club-shaped. Ovary.—Oblong; white; an inch or two long, including the slender style. Stigmas three. Fruit.—Cylindrical; three or four inches long; pendulous, pulpy. Syn.—Yucca baccata, Torr. Hab.—Southern California, from Monterey to San Diego; coast and inland.

The genus Yucca comprises sixteen or eighteen species, and reaches its greatest development in Northern Mexico. Three species are to be found within our borders, two of which are arborescent, Y. arborescens, and Y. Mohavensis. Considerable confusion has hitherto reigned among the species, but they are now better understood.

They are all valuable to our Indians as basket and textile plants, and are useful to them in many other ways.

Owing to the structure of the flowers, self-fertilization seems impossible, and scientists who have made a study of the subject say that these plants are dependent upon a little white, night-flying moth to perform this office for them. This little creature goes from plant to plant, gathering the pollen, which she rolls up into a ball with her feet. When sufficient has been gathered, she goes to another plant, lays her egg in its ovary, and before leaving ascends to the stigma and actually pushes the pollen into it, seeming to realize that unless she performs this last act, there will be nothing for her progeny to eat. This seems an almost incredible instance of insect intelligence; but it is a well-authenticated fact.