Yucca Plant Quotes

The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.

The Yavapais were mountain (and sometimes cave) dwellers who lived on deer, sheep, quail, rabbit, prickly pear, yucca, roots, and the roasted meat of the agave plant.

I learned about the yucca plant, and how the Indians made rope and sandals and mats and baskets, even soap from it, and how they boiled its buds and flowers and fruits to eat. I learned about manzanita and piñon nuts and mesquite beans, and how to crush dried acorns in a mortar, then bake them in unleavened cakes. I had even tasted the stuff and wished I hadn’t.

My other big mistake was letting it slide when she promised me a cut of her earnings. Because it turns out not many people want to stroll through head-high piles of scrap metal and rusty baby buggies down a path lined with artificial yucca plants to have their fortune told by a chain-smoking butterball in a dirty pink sweat suit. If I had thought about it long and hard enough I could’ve predicted that myself.

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

Most dictionaries define tree as a large, perennial, single-trunked, woody plant. This is misleading, for a palm tree contains no wood. Botanists themselves do not bother to distinguish trees from nontrees. Instead, they divide plants into more precise categories, such as angiosperms (flowering plants) and gymnosperms (nonflowering). Angiosperms comprise two diagnostic types, monocots and dicots. Monocots, including palms, are less complex than dicots. They develop from a single embryonic leaf, have basic flowers and no secondary growth (wood). The rootstock is adventitious, meaning that the underground shoots develop independently; the tree has no radicle, or primary root. The simplicity of monocots enhances their agricultural tility. As crops, they supply us with essential carbohydrates—think bananas, yuccas, and edible grasses (rice, wheat, maize, cane). From a botanist’s point of view, a palm is not so different from a giant stalk of grass.

Dire?” the girl asks. And learns from the ranger that the Joshua trees may be on the brink of extinction. Botanists believe they are witnessing a coordinated response to crisis. Perhaps a drought, legible in the plants’ purplish leaves, has resulted in this push. Seeds in abundance. The ancient species’ Hail Mary pass. Yucca moths, attracted by the flowers’ penetrating odor, are their heroic spouses, equally dependent, equally endangered; their larval children feast on yucca seeds.

The Temperance (XIV) Card “Highway 17 in Texas: we stop to watch buzzards supping on a roadkill porcupine. The mountains are a Persian rug of emerald and brown, wolfish clouds gathering rain. The towns stack up like a tarot deck. A row of Mexican women stand at clotheslines, shake the static from dresses. The fortune you believe is the one you'll get. Eres muy sexy, says the wrinkled man at the gas station. Eres divina. The jade cottonwoods speak of flooding; the yucca tattle on the south. You might say this about exile, mountains eroded by six hundred years of women's feet, the heavy press from babies and water buckets. Forty miles south, mothers find their daughters' bodies in boxes. The dusk is a murder of magenta and indigo against the black land, as monstrously beautiful as a rape tree. As we drive, a brown woman names the dying plants. She reads the cacti like an open palm.

The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil’s fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.

Cyanogenic Glycosides. Hydrogen cyanide, which is highly toxic, is released from cyanogenic glycosides when plants that contain them are chewed and digested (through an enzyme that is also present in the plant). Cassava (also called manioc, yucca, and tapioca and a major ingredient in fufu flour), sorghum, lima beans, almonds, bamboo, corn, yams (but not sweet potatoes), chickpeas, cashews, stone fruits (like peaches and apricots), and fruits from the apple family are all food sources of cyanogenic glycosides. In most cases, the amount of these compounds can be greatly reduced using traditional preparation methods, which involves soaking (often grinding and then soaking) or fermenting followed by thorough cooking. Excess cyanide residue from improper preparation is known to cause acute cyanide intoxication and goiters (because cyanide binds to iodine and depletes iodine from the body—hence its status as an antinutrient) and has been linked to ataxia (a neurological disorder affecting the ability to walk). It has also been linked to tropical calcific pancreatitis, leading to chronic pancreatitis. You can minimize your exposure to cyanogenic glycosides by not eating the pits or seeds of stone fruits and fruits from the apple family, by eating only canned bamboo if you’re eating bamboo, and by avoiding fresh cassava (unless you know how to prepare it traditionally, which involves soaking it for at least twenty-four hours before thoroughly cooking it).

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye. Yet our brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an ordered structure.

This biggest and most profound shift happened not be becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa bed and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals.

As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific’s watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trellises dripping with passion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun’s afterglow. Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.

The route led through the enchanted chaos of the Arizona deserts, a country mostly of naked rock in mesas, peaks, and gashed canyons, painted tremendous colors with brushes of comet’s hair. Frequently it was a giant-cactus country — saguaro by designers of modern decoration, cholla by medieval torturers — or a country of yuccas and the yucca’s weirdest form, the Joshua tree. Sometimes it was even a grass country. And through most of the route it was a country where occasionally you could find the characteristic oasis of the Southwest, a little, hidden arroyo with something of a stream in it, choked with cottonwoods, green plants blooming only a rifle shot from desolation.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective. And the most peculiar discovery Nora made was that, of all the extremely divergent variations of herself she had experienced, the most radical sense of change happened within the exact same life. The one she began and ended with. This biggest and most profound shift happened not by becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective. And the most peculiar discovery Nora made was that, of all the extremely divergent variations of herself she had experienced, the most radical sense of change happened within the exact same life. The one she began and ended with. This biggest and most profound shift happened not by becoming richer or more successful or more famous or by being amid the glaciers and polar bears of Svalbard. It happened by waking up in the exact same bed, in the same grotty damp apartment with its dilapidated sofa and yucca plant and tiny potted cacti and bookshelves and untried yoga manuals. There was the same electric piano and books. There was the same sad absence of a feline and lack of a job. There was still the same unknowability about her life ahead. And yet, everything was different. And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfillment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself. And it was different because she was alive, when she had so nearly been dead. And because that had been her choice. A choice to live. Because she had touched the vastness of life and within that vastness she had seen the possibility not only of what she could do, but also feel. There were other scales and other tunes. There was more to her than a flat line of mild to moderate depression, spiced up with occasional flourishes of despair. And that gave her hope, and even the sheer sentimental gratitude of being able to be here, knowing she had the potential to enjoy watching radiant skies and mediocre Ryan Bailey comedies and be happy listening to music and conversation and beat of her own heart. And it was different because, above all other things, that heavy and painful Book of Regrets had been successfully burnt to dust.

Old philosophy textbooks looked down at her, ghost furnishings from her university days, when life still had possibility. A yucca plant and three tiny, squat potted cacti. She imagined being a non-sentient life form sitting in a pot all day was probably an easier existence.