Not Really a Tree

That shaggy thing with its arms in the air isn't a tree. A Joshua tree is a giant yucca, in the agave family, and botanically it sits with grasses and orchids. Tree describes its shape, not its family. Every fork is a record. A branch forms when a growing tip dies, usually from flowering or insect damage, so a tree with a lot of arms is often an old one. First flowers typically come at about fifty to seventy years. There are no rings to count, so the monument's staff measured test trees with instruments every January seventh and July seventh for about seven years. In January of nineteen fifty-three, Superintendent Frank Givens took a photograph from the same spot Ralph Anderson had used in December of nineteen thirty-nine. Thirteen years on, the tallest tree in the clump had grown two feet and a couple of inches. A fallen limb had nearly rotted away, and even the lichen marks on the rocks looked the same. The desert heals its wounds just as slowly, he wrote, so keep out the western film crews. The name Joshua is said to come from Mormon settlers, thinking of his raised arms, though the records offer little evidence for it. In a war emergency, the Paxton Box Company asked to take these trees for surgical splints, because the wood is light, won't split, and takes the shape of a limb when soaked in warm water. And the chairs comedians slam each other over the head with in the movies were usually yucca or Joshua tree. A London company acquired fifty-two hundred acres of Joshua land in the Antelope Valley and contracted to supply the Daily Telegraph with Joshua tree paper, until a cloudburst in February of eighteen eighty-six took out the mill. Find one of those single stalks with no arms at all. It may still be waiting on its first flower.