The Tree That Named a Park
Near Joshua Tree, California
Look out the window and you will see it, arms flung up at wild angles, spiky green tufts on the ends like a creature caught mid dance. This is the Joshua tree, and despite the name it is not a tree at all. It is a giant yucca, a member of the agave family, and its scientific name is Yucca brevifolia.
It grows almost nowhere on Earth except the Mojave Desert, and it needs the higher, cooler, open country of the Mojave to thrive. A big one can stand forty feet tall and live a hundred and fifty years or more, though it has no growth rings, so nobody can say exactly how old any single tree is. It does not have a normal trunk of wood.
It has a fibrous, spongy stem, and every time it blooms or gets damaged, it branches. That is why the old ones look like they are reaching in a dozen directions at once. As for the name, the most famous story says that Mormon pioneers crossing the Mojave in the middle of the eighteen hundreds saw these strange arms raised toward the sky and thought of the biblical figure Joshua lifting his hands in prayer, guiding them onward through the wilderness.
It is a lovely story, and you will hear it told as gospel all over this park. The honest truth is a little murkier. No pioneer diary from those crossings records the name at the moment it was supposedly given.
What we do know is that Mormon settlers in southern Utah were already calling the plant simply the Joshua. Early botanical records from the later nineteenth century note that Mormon settlers already called the plant the Joshua. So the faith connection is real, but the dramatic scene of pioneers naming it on the trail may be a later, prettier retelling.
Either way, the name stuck, and it stuck to a plant found almost nowhere else. The Joshua tree depends on a specialized yucca moth to pollinate its flowers, and the moth depends on the tree to raise its young. Neither can survive without the other.
When you drive through these strange forests, you are looking at one of the most peculiar partnerships in the natural world.
