Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/34

30 crepe-like flowers, five to eight inches across, pure white in color with a rounded mass of yellow stamens in the center.

To transcontinental travelers the deserts are bleak, forbidding wastes, the very antithesis of life, and are passed with a shudder. But to him who follows their shifting trails with burro and pack saddle they open up a new world; animals, plants and the very rocks wholly unlike those of his well-trodden paths through fields and meadows. He may travel for days over the desert without meeting a familiar plant, no conifers, no oak, nor rose, no buttercups or violets. Plants, instead of spreading out broad green leaves to the friendly sunshine, protect themselves from the withering rays of a burning sun by casting off their leaves and forcing their twigs and branches to carry on their work, or by reducing the leaves in size and covering them either with wax, as does the creosote-bush, or with a dense layer of impervious cuticle, as does the desert holly, or with a gray mat of soft down, as do some of the daleas. Others, as the cacti, store up water in their thickened fleshy stems. Still others, members of the gourd family, develop enormous roots for water storage. Pondering on the significance of all these strange types, the wonderful adaptations, the development and modification of structures to meet these severe tests of endurance, one stands amazed at the powers of nature, realizing as never before the vital force of climatic environment.

Low, straggly shrubs of subdued tone and thorny cacti are the common plants of the desert. Of these the most universal is the creosote-bush with its waxy leaves, bright yellow flowers and all-pervading odor. Along living streams grow willows and cottonwoods, but desert trees are few in number. Where a little moisture is permanently retained, mesquit, palo verde and ironwood may be found. In the Mojave Desert the most striking feature is the yucca, which forms weird, fantastic groves scattered orchard-like over many square miles, the Joshua tree of the early Mormon settlers. On the western rim of the Colorado Desert, fringing the base of the southern California mountains, are several groves of the desert palm. An especially fine group is in Palm Cañon, splendid trees with straight, unbranched trunks eighty to one hundred feet high, crowned by great tufts of spreading fan-shaped leaves and clothed sometimes nearly to the base with withered leaves that lie pendant along the sides in great thatch-like masses. Here is a veritable Saharan oasis, and there eight miles away and ten thousand feet above, stands the summit of San Jacinto, harboring typical arctic plants around its lingering patches of snow.

Such are the contrasts of California.