Part 22

RATTLE-WEED. LOCO-WEED.

Astragalus leucopsis, Torr. and Gray. Pea Family.

Stems.--A foot or so high. Leaflets.--In many pairs; six lines or more long. Flowers.--Greenish-white; six lines long; in spikelike racemes an inch or two long. Calyx.--With teeth more than half the length of the campanulate-tube. Pod.--Thin; bladdery-inflated; an inch or more long, on a smooth stalk twice or thrice the length of the calyx-tube. (See Astragalus.) Hab.--Santa Barbara to San Diego.

These plants are very noticeable and quite pretty, with their pale foliage, symmetrical leaves, and white flowers; but they are dreaded by the farmers of the region of their growth, who aver that they are deadly loco-weeds. It is said that native stock will not touch them; but animals brought from a distance and unacquainted with them, eat them, with dreadful results of loco.

We have numerous species, all rather difficult of determination.

WILD MORNING-GLORY.

Convolvulus luteolus, Gray. Morning-Glory Family.

Stems.--Twining and climbing twenty feet or more. Leaves.--Alternate; sagittate; two inches or so long; smooth. Peduncles.--Several-flowered; axillary, with two small linear-lanceolate bracts a little below the flower. Flowers.--Cream-color or pinkish, sometimes deep rose. Sepals.--Five; without bracts immediately below them. Corolla.--Open funnel-form; eighteen lines long; not lobed or angled. Stamens.--Five. Ovary.--Globose; two-celled or imperfectly four-celled. Style filiform. Stigmas two. Hab.--Throughout California.

I remember long stretches of mountain road where the wild morning-glory has completely covered the unsightly shrubs charred by a previous year's fire, flinging out its slender stems, lacing and interlacing them in airy festoons, which are covered with the fragile flowers in greatest profusion. In these tangles, the industrious spiders have hung their exquisite geometrical webs, which catch the glittering water-drops in their meshes. When the sun comes out after a dense, cool fog-bath on a summer morning, nothing more charmingly fresh could be imagined than such a scene.

The common morning-glory of the south--C. occidentalis, Gray--is very similar to the above, but may be distinguished from it by the pair of large, thin bracts immediately below the calyx and enveloping it.

Another very pretty species is C. villosus, Gray. This is widely distributed, but not very common. Its trailing stems and foliage are of a velvety sage-gray throughout, and its small flowers of a yellowish cream-color. The hastate leaves are shapely, and the whole plant is charming when grown away from dust.

The common European bindweed--C. arvensis, L.--is to the farmer a very unwelcome little immigrant. In fields it becomes a serious pest; for the more its roots are disturbed and broken up the better it thrives. But despite its bad character, we cannot help admiring its pretty little white funnels, which lift themselves so debonairly among the prostrate stems and leaves.

In medicine a tincture of the whole plant is valued for several uses.

WOOD-BALM. PITCHER-SAGE.

Sphacele calycina, Benth. Mint Family.

Woody at the base; two to five feet high; hairy or woolly. Leaves.--Two to four inches long. Flowers.--Dull white or purplish; an inch or more long; mostly solitary in the upper axils. Calyx.--Five-cleft. Corolla.--Having a hairy ring at base within. Stamens.--Four, in two pairs. Ovary.--Of four seedlike nutlets. Style filiform. Stigma two-lobed. Hab.--Dry hills. San Francisco Bay, southward.

The wood-balm is closely allied to the sages, which fact is betrayed by its opposite, wrinkly, sage-scented leaves; but its flowers have quite a different aspect. These are ample and cylindrical, with a five-lobed border, one of the lobes being prolonged into somewhat of a lip.

The generic name is from the Greek word meaning sage; and the specific name, signifying cuplike, refers to the shape of the blossoms.

The dwellers among our southern mountains, with that happy instinct possessed by those who live close to the heart of nature, have aptly named this "pitcher-sage."

After the flowers have passed away, the large inflated, light-green calyxes, densely crowded upon the stems, become quite conspicuous.

YUCCA-PALM. TREE-YUCCA. JOSHUA-TREE.

Yucca arborescens, Trelease. Lily Family.

Scraggly trees; thirty, or forty feet high; with trunks one or two feet in diameter. Leaves.--Eight inches long; crowded; rigid; spine-tipped; serrulate; the older ones reflexed and sun-bleached, the younger ashy-green. Flowers.--In sessile, ovate panicles, terminating the branches. Panicles several inches long. Perianth.--Narrowly campanulate; eighteen to thirty lines long. Fruit.--Two or three inches long. (Otherwise as Y. Mohavensis.) Hab.--Southwestern Utah to the Mojave Desert.

The traveler crossing the Mojave Desert upon the railroad has his curiosity violently aroused by certain fantastic tree forms that whirl by the car windows. These are the curious Joshua-trees of the Mormons, which are called in California tree-yucca or yucca-palm. A writer in "The Land of Sunshine" thus aptly characterizes them: "Weird, twisted, demoniacal, the yuccas remind me of those enchanted forests described by Dante, whose trees were human creatures in torment. In twisted groups or standing isolated, they may readily be imagined specters of the plains."

Mr. Sargent tells us that, though found much to the eastward of our borders, it abounds in the Mojave Desert, where it attains its largest size and forms a belt of gaunt, straggling forest several miles in width along the desert's western rim.

Its flowers appear from March to May, but are not at all attractive, on account of their soiled white color and disagreeable, fetid odor. "The unopened panicles form conspicuous cones eight to ten inches long, covered with closely overlapping white scales, often flushed with purple at the apex."

The seeds are gathered and used by the omnivorous Indians, who grind them into meal, which they eat either raw or cooked as a mush. The wood furnishes an excellent material for paper pulp, and some years ago an English company established a mill at Ravenna, in Soledad Pass, for its manufacture. It is said that several editions of a London journal were printed upon it, but owing to the great cost of its manufacture, the enterprise had to be abandoned.

The light wood is put to many uses now, and in the curio bazaars of the south it plays a conspicuous part, made into many small articles. By sawing round and round the trunk of the tree, thin sheets of considerable size are procured. A sepia reproduction of one of the old missions upon the ivory-tinted ground of one of these combines sentiment and novelty in a very pretty souvenir. Surgeons find these same sheets excellent for splints, as they are unyielding in one direction and pliable in the other; and orchardists wrap them around the bases of their trees to protect them from the gnawing of rabbits.