Strange Plants

Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) are among the strangest-looking plants in the desert. With their shaggy trunks, spiky leaves, and branches pointing in seemingly random directions, they look as though someone gave a tree a bad haircut and told it to stand still for a few hundred years. No two seem to grow quite the same way, and some look downright confused about which direction is up. They’re not particularly graceful, they offer very little shade, and hugging one is definitely out of the question. Still, they have a certain charm, even if they do look like the result of a gardening experiment gone terribly wrong.