![]() ![]() The wood is a harsh, rasping fibre knife blades long hard and keen fill the place of leaves the flower is greenish white and ill smelling and the fruit a cluster of nubbly pods, bitter and useless. A misshapen pirate with belt boots hands and teeth stuck full of daggers is as near as I can come to a human analogy. One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant. It is a weird menacing object more like some conception of Poe’s or Doré’s than any work of wholesome Mother Nature. Fultz, better known for his advocacy of chaparral native shrubs, had this to say about Joshua trees in Scientific American in 1919: “Whenever I see the Joshua trees I think how considerate they have been in choosing to make their home where few men have a desire to live.” In that same year, in his best-seller California Desert Trails, writer Joseph Smeaton Chase made Francis Fultz look positively enamored of the Joshua tree, by comparison, writing He was the first writer to vilify the Joshua tree he would not be the last. Associated with the idea of barren sands, their stiff and ungraceful form makes them to the traveler the most repulsive tree in the vegetable kingdom.įrémont was writing of Joshua trees, though they would not come to be called that in Southern California for about eighty more years. He was not precisely charmed by the oddly formed tree, or at least that’s how he recounted it months later, writing:Ĭrossing a low sierra, and descending a hollow where a spring gushed out, we were struck by the sudden appearance of yucca trees, which gave a strange and southern character to the country, and suited well with the dry and desert region we were approaching. Frémont of the U.S Army Corps of Topographical Engineers became the first white settler to record the existence of one of the Mojave’s more unusual plant species. On April 14, 1844, riding eastward out of the Tehachapi Pass near Oak Creek into a landscape that would later come to be called the Mojave Desert, Brevet Captain John C.
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