CACTUS AND GREASE WOOD
[Sidenote: Views of Nature.]
[Sidenote: Growth and decay.]
Nature seems a benevolent or a malevolent goddess just as our own
inadequate vision happens to see her. If we have eyes only for her
creative beauties we think her all goodness; if we see only her power
of destruction we incline to think she is all evil. With what infinite
care and patience, worthy only of a good goddess, does she build up
the child, the animal, the bird, the tree, the flower! How wonderfully
she fits each for its purpose, rounding it with strength, energy, and
grace; and beautifying it with a prodigality of colors. For twenty
years she works night and day to bring the child to perfection,
for twenty days she toils upon the burnished wings of some insect
buzzing in the sunlight, for twenty hours she paints the gold upon
the petals of the dandelion. And then what? What of the next twenty?
Does she leave her handiwork to take care of itself until an unseen
dragon called Decay comes along to destroy it? Not at all. The good
goddess has a hand that builds up. Yes; and she has another hand that
takes down. The marvellous skill of the one has its complement, its
counterpart, in the other. Block by block she takes apart the mosaic
with just as much deftness as she put it together.
[Sidenote: Nature’s plan.]
[Sidenote: The law of change.]
Those first twenty years of our life we were allowed to sap blood and
strength from our surroundings; the last twenty years of our life our
surroundings are allowed to sap blood and strength from us. It is
Nature’s plan and it is carried out without any feeling. With the same
indifferent spirit that she planted in us an eye to see or an ear to
hear, she afterward plants a microbe to breed and a cancer to eat. She
in herself is both growth and decay. The virile and healthy things
of the earth are hers; and so, too, are disease, dissolution, and
death. The flower and the grass spring up, they fade, they wither; and
Nature neither rejoices in the life nor sorrows in the death. She is
neither good nor evil; she is only a great law of change that passeth
understanding. The gorgeous pageantry of the earth with all its beauty,
the life thereon with its hopes and fears and struggles, and we a part
of the universal whole, are brought up from the dust to dance on the
green in the sunlight for an hour; and then the procession that comes
after us turns the sod and we creep back to Mother Earth. All, all to
dust again; and no man to this day knoweth the why thereof.
[Sidenote: Nature foiling her own plans.]
[Sidenote: Attack and defence.]
One is continually assailed with queries of this sort whenever and
wherever he begins to study Nature. He never ceases to wonder why she
should take such pains to foil her own plans and bring to naught her
own creations. Why did she give the flying fish such a willowy tail and
such long fins, why did she labor so industriously to give him power of
flight, when at the same time she was giving another fish in the sea
greater strength, and a bird in the air greater swiftness wherewith to
destroy him? Why should she make the tarantula such a powerful engine
of destruction when she was in the same hour making his destroyer, the
tarantula-wasp? And always here in the desert the question comes up:
Why should Nature give these shrubs and plants such powers of endurance
and resistance, and then surround them by heat, drouth, and the attacks
of desert animals? It is existence for a day, but sooner or later the
growth goes down and is beaten into dust.
[Sidenote: Preservation of the species.]
[Sidenote: Means of preservation.]
The individual dies. Yes; but not the species. Perhaps now we are
coming closer to an understanding of Nature’s method. It is the species
that she designs to last, for a period at least; and the individual is
of no great importance, merely a sustaining factor, one among millions
requiring continual renewal. It is a small matter whether there are a
thousand acres of grease wood more or less, but it is important that
the family be not extinguished. It grows readily in the most barren
spots, is very abundant and very hardy, and hence is protected only
by an odor and a varnish. On the contrary take the bisnaga--a rather
rare cactus. It has only a thin, short tap-root, therefore it has an
enormous upper reservoir in which to store water, and a most formidable
armor of fish-hook shaped spines that no beast or bird can penetrate.
Remove the danger which threatens the extinction of the family and
immediately Nature removes the defensive armor. On the desert, for
instance, the yucca has a thorn like a point of steel. Follow it from
the desert into the high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is
plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to thrive,
and you will find it turned into a tree, and the thorn merely a dull
blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the pitahaya into the tropics
again, and with their cousin, the organ cactus, you find them growing
a soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing. Abundance of soil
and rain, abundance of other vegetation for browsing animals, and there
is no longer need of protection. With it the family would increase too
rapidly.
[Sidenote: Maintaining the status quo.]
So it seems that Nature desires neither increase nor decrease in the
species. She wishes to maintain the _status quo_. And for the sake of
keeping up the general healthfulness and virility of her species she
requires that there shall be change in the component parts. Each must
suffer not a “sea change,” but a chemical change; and passing into
liquids, gases, or dusts, still from the grave help on the universal
plan. So it is that though Nature dips each one of her desert growths
into the Styx to make them invulnerable, yet ever she holds them by the
heel and leaves one point open to the destroying arrow.
[Sidenote: The plant struggle for life.]
[Sidenote: Fighting heat and drouth.]
Yet it is remarkable how Nature designs and prepares the contest--the
struggle for life--that is continually going on in her world. How
wonderfully she arms both offence and defence! What grounds she chooses
for the conflict! What stern conditions she lays down! Given a waste
of sand and rock, given a heat so intense that under a summer sun the
stones will blister a bare foot like hot iron, given perhaps two or
three inches of rain in a twelvemonth; and what vegetation could one
expect to find growing there? Obviously, none at all. But no; Nature
insists that something shall fight heat and drouth even here, and so
she designs strange growths that live a starved life, and bring forth
after their kind with much labor. Hardiest of the hardy are these
plants and just as fierce in their way as the wild-cat. You cannot
touch them for the claw. They have no idea of dying without a struggle.
You will find every one of them admirably fitted to endure. They are
marvellous engines of resistance.
[Sidenote: Prevention of evaporation.]
[Sidenote: Absence of large leaves.]
[Sidenote: Exhaust of moisture.]
The first thing that all these plants have to fight against is heat,
drouth, and the evaporation of what little moisture they may have.
And here Nature has equipped them with ingenuity and cunning. Not
all are designed alike, to be sure, but each after its kind is good.
There are the cacti, for example, that will grow where everything else
perishes. Why? For one reason because they have geometrical forms that
prevent loss from evaporation by contracting a minimum surface for a
given bulk of tissue.[6] There is no waste, no unnecessary exposure of
surface. Then there are some members of the family like the “old man”
cactus, that have thick coatings of spines and long hairy growths that
prevent the evaporation of moisture by keeping off the wind. Then again
the cacti have no leaves to tempt the sun. Many of the desert growths
are so constructed. Even such a tree as the lluvia d’oro has needles
rather than leaves, though it does put forth a row of tiny leaves near
the end of the needle; and when we come to examine the ordinary trees
such as the mesquite, the depua, the palo breya, the palo verde, and
all the acacia family, we find they have very narrow leaves that have a
fashion of hanging diagonally to the sun and thus avoiding the direct
rays. Nature is determined that there shall be no unnecessary exhaust
of moisture through foliage. The large-leafed bush or tree does not
exist. The best shade to be found on the desert is under the mesquite,
and unless it is very large, the sun falls through it easily enough.
[Sidenote: Gums and varnishes of bushes.]
As an extra precaution some shrubs are given a shellac-like sap or
gum with which they varnish their leaves and make evaporation almost
impossible. The ordinary greasewood is an example of this; and perhaps
because of its varnish, it is, with the cacti, the hardiest of all the
desert growths. It is found wherever anything living is found, and
flourishes under the fiercest heat. Its leaves always look bright and
have a sticky feeling about them as though recently shellacked.
[Sidenote: The ocatilla.]
There are other growths that seem to have a fine sense of discretion in
the matter of danger, for they let fall all their leaves at the first
approach of drouth. The ocatilla, or “candle wood” as it is sometimes
called, puts out a long row of bright leaves along its stems after a
rain, but as soon as drouth comes it sheds them hastily and then stands
for months in the sunlight--a bundle of bare sticks soaked with a resin
that will burn with fire, but will not evaporate with heat. The sangre
de dragon (sometimes called sangre en grado) does the same thing.
[Sidenote: Tap roots.]
[Sidenote: Underground structure.]
But Nature’s most common device for the protection and preservation
of her desert brood is to supply them with wonderful facilities for
finding and sapping what moisture there is, and conserving it in
tanks and reservoirs. The roots of the greasewood and the mesquite are
almost as powerful as the arms of an octopus, and they are frequently
three times the length of the bush or tree they support. They will bore
their way through rotten granite to find a damp ledge almost as easily
as a diamond drill; and they will pry rocks from their foundations as
readily as the wistaria wrenches the ornamental wood-work from the
roof of a porch. They are always thirsty and they are always running
here and there in the search for moisture. A vertical section of their
underground structure revealed by the cutting away of a river bank or
wash is usually a great surprise. One marvels at the great network of
roots required to support such a very little growth above ground.
[Sidenote: Feeding the top growth.]
Yet this network serves a double purpose. It not only finds and gathers
what moisture there is but stores it in its roots, feeding the top
growth with it economically, not wastefully. It has no notion of
sending too much moisture up to the sunlight and the air. Cut a twig
and it will often appear very dry; cut a root and you will find it
moist.
[Sidenote: Storage reservoirs below ground.]
The storage reservoir below ground is not an unusual method of
supplying water to the plant. Many of the desert growths have it.
Perhaps the most notable example of it is the wild gourd. This is
little more than an enormous tap root that spreads out turnip-shaped
and is in size often as large around as a man’s body. It holds water
in its pulpy tissue for months at a time, and while almost everything
above ground is parched and dying the vines and leaves of the gourd,
fed from the reservoir below, will go on growing and the flowers
continue blooming with the most unruffled serenity. In the Sonora
deserts there is a cactus or a bush (its name I have never heard)
growing from a root that looks almost like a hornet’s nest. This root
is half-wood, half-vegetable, and is again a water reservoir like the
root of the gourd.
[Sidenote: Reservoirs above ground.]
But there are reservoirs above ground quite as interesting as those
below. The tall fluted column of the sahuaro, sometimes fifty feet
high, is little more than an upright cistern for holding moisture. Its
support within is a series of sticks arranged in cylindrical form and
held together by some fibre, some tissue, and a great deal of saturated
pulp. Drive a stick into it after a rain and it will run sap almost
like the maguey from which the Indians distill mescal. All the cacti
conserve water in their lobes or columns or at the base near the
ground. So too the Spanish bayonets, the yuccas, the prickly pears and
the chollas.
[Sidenote: Thickened barks.]
[Sidenote: Gathering moisture.]
Many of the shrubs and trees like the sangre de dragon and the torote
have enlarged or thickened barks to hold and supply water. If you cut
them the sap runs readily. When it congeals it forms a gum which heals
over the wound and once more prevents evaporation. Existence for the
plants would be impossible without such inventions. Plant life of every
kind requires some moisture all the time. It is an error to suppose
because they grow in the so-called “rainless desert” that therefore
they exist without water. They gather and husband it during wet periods
for use during dry periods, and in doing so they seem to display almost
as much intelligence as a squirrel or an ant does in storing food for
winter consumption.
[Sidenote: Attacks upon desert plants.]
[Sidenote: Browsing animals.]
Is Nature’s task completed then when she has provided the plants with
reservoirs of water and tap roots to pump for them? By no means. How
long would a tank of moisture exist in the desert if unprotected from
the desert animals? The mule-deer lives here, and he can go for weeks
without water, but he will take it every day if he can get it. And the
coyote can run the hills indefinitely with little or no moisture; but
he will eat a water melon, rind and all, and with great relish, when
the opportunity offers. The sahuaro, the bisnaga, the cholla, and the
pan-cake lobed prickly pear would have a short life and not a merry one
if they were left to the mercy of the desert prowler. As it is they
are sometimes sadly worried about their roots by rabbits and in their
lobes by the deer. It seems almost incredible but is not the less a
fact, that deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla--fruit, stem, and
trunk--though it bristles with spines that will draw blood from the
human hand at the slightest touch.
[Sidenote: Weapons of defense.]
[Sidenote: The spine and thorn.]
Nature knows very well that the attack will come and so she provides
her plants with various different defenses. The most common weapon
which she gives them is the spine or thorn. Almost everything that
grows has it and its different forms are many. They are all of them
sharp as a needle and some of them have saw-edges that rip anything
with which they come in contact. The grasses, and those plants akin
to them like the yucca and the maguey, are often both saw-edged and
spine-pointed. All the cacti have thorns, some straight, some barbed
like a harpoon, some curved like a hook. There are chollas that
have a sheath covering the thorn--a scabbard to the sword--and when
anything pushes against it the sheath is left sticking in the wound.
The different forms of the bisnaga are little more than vegetable
porcupines. They bristle with quills or have hook-shaped thorns that
catch and hold the intruder. The sahuaro has not so many spines, but
they are so arranged that you can hardly strike the cylinder without
striking the thorns.
[Sidenote: The crucifixion thorn.]
The cacti are defended better than the other growths because they have
more to lose, and are consequently more subject to attack. And yet
there is one notable exception. The crucifixion thorn is a bush or tree
somewhat like the palo verde, except that it has no leaf. It is a thorn
and little else. Each small twig runs out and ends in a sharp spike
of which the branch is but the supporting shaft. It bears in August
a small yellow flower but this grows out of the side of the spike.
In fact the whole shrub seems created for no other purpose than the
glorification of the thorn as a thorn.[7]
[Sidenote: The sting of flowers.]
[Sidenote: Fierceness of the plant.]
Tree, bush, plant and grass--great and small alike--each has its sting
for the intruder. You can hardly stoop to pick a desert flower or pull
a bunch of small grass without being aware of a prickle on your hand.
Nature seems to have provided a whole arsenal of defensive weapons for
these poor starved plants of the desert. Not any of the lovely growths
of the earth, like the lilies and the daffodils, are so well defended.
And she has given them not only armor but a spirit of tenacity and
stubbornness wherewith to carry on the struggle. Cut out the purslain
and the iron weed from the garden walk, and it springs up again and
again, contending for life. Put heat, drouth, and animal attack against
the desert shrubs and they fight back like the higher forms of organic
life. How typical they are of everything in and about the desert. There
is but one word to describe it and that word--fierce--I shall have worn
threadbare before I have finished these chapters.
[Sidenote: Odors and juices.]
[Sidenote: Saps astringent and cathartic.]
We have not yet done with enumerating the defenses of these plants. The
bushes like the greasewood and the sage have not the bulk of body to
grow the thorn. They are too slight, too rambling in make-up. Besides
their reservoirs are protected by being in their roots under the
ground. But Nature has not left their tops wholly at the mercy of the
deer. Take the leaf of the sage and crush it in your hand. The odor is
anything but pleasant. No animal except the jack-rabbit, no bird except
the sage hen will eat it; and no human being will eat either the rabbit
or the hen, if he can get anything else, because of the rank sage
flavor. Rub the greasewood in your hand and it feels harsh and brittle.
The resinous varnish of the leaves gives it a sticky feeling and a
disagreeable odor again. Nothing on the desert will touch it. Cut or
break a twig of the sangre de dragon and a red sap like blood runs out.
Touch it to the tongue and it proves the most powerful of astringents.
The Indians use it to cauterize bullet wounds. Again no animal will
touch it. Half the plants on the desert put forth their leaves with
impunity. They are not disturbed by either browsers or grazers. Some of
them are poisonous, many of them are cathartic or emetic, nearly all of
them are disagreeable to the taste.
[Sidenote: The expenditure of energy.]
[Sidenote: The desert covering.]
So it seems with spines, thorns, barbs, resins, varnishes and odorous
smells Nature has armed her desert own very effectually. And her
expenditure of energy may seem singularly disproportionate to the
result attained. The little vegetation that grows in the waste may not
seem worth while, may seem insignificant compared with the great care
bestowed upon it. But Nature does not think so. To her the cactus of
the desert is just as important in its place as the arrowy pine on the
mountain. She means that something shall grow and bear fruit after its
kind even on the gravel beds of the Colorado; she means that the desert
shall have its covering, scanty though it be, just the same as the
well-watered lands of the tropics.
[Sidenote: Use of desert plants.]
But are they useful, these desert growths? Certainly they are; just as
useful as the pine tree or the potato plant. To be sure, man cannot
saw them into boards or cook them in a pot; but then Nature has other
animals beside man to look after, other uses for her products than
supporting human life. She toils and spins for all alike and man is not
her special care. The desert vegetation answers her purposes and who
shall say her purposes have ever been other than wise?
[Sidenote: Their beauty.]
[Sidenote: Beauty in character.]
Are they beautiful these plants and shrubs of the desert? Now just
what do you mean by that word “beautiful”? Do you mean something of
regular form, something smooth and pretty? Are you dragging into
nature some remembrances of classic art; and are you looking for the
Dionysius face, the Doryphorus form, among these trees and bushes?
If so the desert will not furnish you too much of beauty. But if you
mean something that has a distinct character, something appropriate to
its setting, something admirably fitted to a designed end (as in art
the peasants of Millet or the burghers of Rembrandt and Rodin), then
the desert will show forth much that people nowadays are beginning to
think beautiful. Mind you, perfect form and perfect color are not to
be despised; neither shall you despise perfect fitness and perfect
character. The desert plants, every one of them, have very positive
characters; and I am not certain but that many of them are interesting
and beautiful even in form and color.
[Sidenote: Forms of the yucca and maguey.]
[Sidenote: The lluvia d’oro.]
No doubt it is an acquired taste that leads one to admire greasewood
and cactus; but can anyone be blind to the graceful form of the
maguey, or better still, the yucca with its tall stalk rising like a
shaft from a bowl and capped at the top by nodding creamy flowers? On
the mountains and the mesas the sahuaro is so common that perhaps we
overlook its beauty of form; yet its lines are as sinuous as those of
a Moslem minaret, its flutings as perfect as those of a Doric column.
Often and often you see it standing on a ledge of some rocky peak,
like the lone shaft of a ruined temple on a Greek headland. And by
way of contrast what could be more lovely than the waving lightness,
the drooping gracefulness of the lluvia d’oro. The swaying tossing
lluvia d’oro, well called the “shower of gold”! It is one of the most
beautiful of the desert trees with its white skin like the northern
birch, its long needles like the pine, and the downward sweep of its
branches like the willow. A strange wild tree that seems to shun all
society, preferring to dwell like a hermit among the rocks. It roots
itself in the fissures of broken granite and it seems at its happiest
when it can let down its shower of gold over some precipice.
[Sidenote: Grotesque forms.]
[Sidenote: Abnormal colors.]
There are other tree forms, like the palo verde and the mesquite, that
are not wanting in a native grace; and yet it may as well be admitted
that most of the trees and bushes are lacking in height, mass, and
majesty. It is no place for large growths that reach up to the sun.
The heat and drouth are too great and tend to make form angular and
grotesque. But these very conditions that dwarf form perhaps enhance
color by distorting it in an analogous manner. When plants are starved
for water and grow in thin poor soil they often put on colors that are
abnormal, even unhealthy. Because of starvation perhaps the little
green of the desert is a sallow green; and for the same reason the
lobes of the prickly pear are pale-green, dull yellow, sad pink or
livid mauve. The prickly pear seems to take all colors dependent
upon the poverty, or the mineral character, of the ground where it
grows. In that respect perhaps it is influenced in the same way as the
parti-colored hydrangea of the eastern dooryard.
[Sidenote: Blossoms and flowers.]
[Sidenote: Many varieties.]
All the cacti are brilliant in the flowers they bear. The top of the
bisnaga in summer is at first a mass of yellow, then bright orange,
finally dark red. The sahuaro bears a purple flower, and the cholla,
the ocatilla, the pitahaya come along with pink or gold or red or blue
flowers. And again all the bushes and trees in summer put forth showers
of color--graceful masses of petaled cups that look more like flowers
grown in a meadow than blossoms grown on a tree. In June the palo verde
is a great ball of yellow-gold, but there is a variety of it with a
blue-green bark that grows a blossom almost like an eastern violet.
And down in Sonora one is dazzled by the splendor of the guyacan (or
guallacan) which throws out blossoms half-blue and half-red. All the
commoner growths like the sage, the mesquite, the palo fierro, and
the palo blanco, are blossom bearers. In fact everything that grows
at all in the desert puts forth in season some bright little flag of
color. In the mass they make little show, but examined in the part they
are interesting because of their nurture, their isolation, and their
peculiarity of form and color. The conditions of life have perhaps
contorted them, have paled or grayed or flushed or made morbid their
coloring; but they are all of them beautiful. Beautiful color is
usually unhealthy color as we have already suggested.
[Sidenote: Wild flowers.]
[Sidenote: Salt-bush.]
Aside from the blossoms upon bush and tree there are few bright petals
shining in the desert. It is no place for flowers. They are too
delicate and are usually wanting in tap root and armor. If they spring
up they are soon cut down by drouth or destroyed by animals. Many tales
are told of the flowers that grow on the waste after the rains, but I
have not seen them though I have seen the rains. There are no lupins,
phacelias, pentstemons, poppies, or yellow violets. Occasionally
one sees the wild verbena or patches of the evening primrose, or up
in the swales the little baby blue-eye growing all alone, or perhaps
the yellow mimulus; but all told they do not make up a very strong
contingent. The salt bush that looks the color of Scotch heather,
out-bulks them all; and yet is not conspicuously apparent. Higher up
in the hills and along the mesas one often meets with many strange
flowers, some fiery red and some with spines like the Canadian thistle;
but not down in the hot valleys of the desert.
[Sidenote: The grasses.]
[Sidenote: The lichens.]
Nor are there many grasses of consequence aside from a small curled
grass and the heavy sacaton that grow in bunches upon isolated portions
of the desert. By “isolated” I mean that for some unknown reason there
are tracts on the desert seemingly sacred to certain plants, some to
cholla, some to yuccas, some to grease wood, some to sahuaros, some to
sacaton grass. It seems to be a desert oddity that the vegetation does
not mix or mingle to any great extent. There are seldom more than four
or five kinds of growth to be found in one tract. It is even noticeable
in the lichens. One mountain range will have all gray lichens on its
northern walls, another range will have all orange lichens, and still
another will be mottled by patches of coal-black lichens.
[Sidenote: The continuous struggle.]
Strange growths of a strange land! Heat, drouth, and starvation gnawing
at their vitals month in and month out; and yet how determined to live,
how determined to fulfill their destiny! They keep fighting off the
elements, the animals, the birds. Never by day or by night do they
loose the armor or drop the spear point. And yet with all the struggle
they serenely blossom in season, perpetuate their kinds, and hand down
the struggle to the newer generation with no jot of vigor abated, no
tittle of hope dissipated. Strange growths indeed! And yet strange,
perhaps, only to us who have never known their untrumpeted history.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] I am indebted to Professor Forbes of the University of Arizona for
this and several other statements in connection with desert vegetation.
[7] It is said to be very scarce but I have found it growing along
the Castle Creek region of Arizona, also at Kingman, Peach Springs,
and further north. A stunted variety grows on the Mojave but it is not
frequently seen on the Colorado.