To Underestimate One's Thirst, To Pass A Given
Landmark To The Right Or Left, To Find A Dry Spring Where One
Looked For Running Water--There Is No Help For Any Of These Things.
Along springs and sunken watercourses one is surprised to find
such water-loving plants as grow widely in moist ground, but the
true desert breeds its own kind, each in its particular habitat.
The angle of the slope, the frontage of a hill, the structure
of the soil determines the plant. South-looking hills are nearly
bare, and the lower tree-line higher here by a thousand feet.
Canons running east and west will have one wall naked and one
clothed. Around dry lakes and marshes the herbage preserves a set
and orderly arrangement. Most species have well-defined areas of
growth, the best index the voiceless land can give the traveler
of his whereabouts.
If you have any doubt about it, know that the desert begins
with the creosote. This immortal shrub spreads down into Death
Valley and up to the lower timberline, odorous and medicinal as
you might guess from the name, wandlike, with shining fretted
foliage. Its vivid green is grateful to the eye in a wilderness of
gray and greenish white shrubs. In the spring it exudes a resinous
gum which the Indians of those parts know how to use with
pulverized rock for cementing arrow points to shafts. Trust
Indians not to miss any virtues of the plant world!
Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the
unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. Tormented, thin forests of it
stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular
slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the Sierras and
coastwise hills where the first swings across the southern end of
the San Joaquin Valley. The yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed
leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age, tipped with
panicles of fetid, greenish bloom. After death, which is slow,
the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power
to rot, makes the moonlight fearful. Before the yucca has come to
flower, while yet its bloom is a creamy cone-shaped bud of the size
of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap, the Indians twist it deftly
out of its fence of daggers and roast it for their own delectation.
So it is that in those parts where man inhabits one sees young
plants of Yucca arborensis infrequently. Other yuccas,
cacti, low herbs, a thousand sorts, one finds journeying east from
the coastwise hills. There is neither poverty of soil nor species
to account for the sparseness of desert growth, but simply that
each plant requires more room. So much earth must be preempted to
extract so much moisture. The real struggle for existence, the
real brain of the plant, is underground; above there is room for
a rounded perfect growth. In Death Valley, reputed the very core
of desolation, are nearly two hundred identified species.
Above the lower tree-line, which is also the snowline, mapped
out abruptly by the sun, one finds spreading growth of pinon,
juniper, branched nearly to the ground, lilac and sage, and
scattering white pines.
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