The chaparral yucca (Yucca whipplei) grows for many years as a hemisphere of sharp spines (Spanish bayonet), then some spring days, a large shoot rises 10’ to 20’ feet in a period of two or three weeks, blooms, and dies.
For some years, I have been photographing these magnificent plants near my cabin at Chilao Flat in the San Gabriel mountains north of Pasadena.
Last spring, I was determined to show the development of the flowering stalk with a series of photographs taken at weekly intervals.
I took the pictures at the same time of day each week, using a model dressed the same way. It then occurred to me that I might enjoy the pictures.
Articles About Yucca Whippier
I wrote an article claiming that the pictures were taken at one-second intervals and that this was a rare variety of the plant (Yucca Whippier, var. Schuss) occurring only at Chilao Flat.
I further invented it with an eminent German botanist. Professor Ferdinand Greenspan (Greenspan in German means “verdigris”) wrote a 20-volume work, Handbuch der Yucca (Leipzig: Schmutzig Verlag (1893)). (Schmutzig Verlag means “Dirty Edition”).
He visited Chilao Flat, riding a burro, in the spring of 1890 and devoted volumes 13 and 14 of his work to the Schuss-yucca, which he had named thus from the German Schuss (to shoot up).
But contemporary botanists refused to believe the professor, ridiculing the poor man to such an extent that he died unhappily but maintaining “Erschiesst doch!” (It does shoot up!)
I did not intend the article as a hoax but merely as scientific humor, and I included several cues to indicate this. First, I purposely claimed that the yucca grew in the preposterously short period of four seconds so that no one would be deceived.
And in addition to the humorous German words already indicated, I stated that an astronomer at Mount Wilson, a few miles to the south, saw a Schuss-yucca while he was “fooling around with the 100-inch telescope.”
A skier who had “gotten off his course in a slalom race down Mount Waterman” also saw one. (No one fools around with the 100-inch telescope, and you just can’t get off your course in a slalom race — certainly not by the 10 miles from Mount Waterman to Chilao Flat.)
Publishing Schuss-Yuccas Photographs
Hearing these rumors, I repaired the scene with my model and a “fifth of antivenin” (because of the rattlesnakes). The deer, whose “uncanny instinct” tells them which plants are ready to sprout, guided us, and we got the pictures, thus vindicating Professor Greenspann.
In my closing paragraph, I said that Schuss-yuccas are just as possible as extra-terrestrial flying saucers, thus getting in a dig at some scientists who claim they are from another planet.
Nobody, I thought, could believe such preposterous yarn. Readers would get a laugh at it, and botanists might like the pictures.
Scientific Monthly must have thought the same and published the article in their October 1952 issue. The results astonished me.
The science editor of a great New York newspaper called me long distance to ask for the photographs to publish in his paper.
He had already published a short account of the amazing plant under the heading, “Stalk grows 10 feet in two minutes.” So he was crestfallen when I told him the truth.
A national news service had begun work on the photographs and was set to release the story over their wires when someone tipped them off at the last minute.
A large London Sunday paper published the story as fact, and the Royal Horticultural Society, after a thorough search for Professor Griinspann and his 20-volume Ilandbuch, decided it was a joke.
A national weekly magazine telegraphed me for the photographs and further details of my “expedition.” “What,” the editor asked, “did the model say in those few brief moments while the yucca shot up?” He later wrote to me that his leg was still tender from being pulled so hard.
A gardening magazine wanted to reprint my article as one of the best of the year. I haven’t yet received a reply to the letter I sent them. Two European magazines wanted the photographs and more details.
A gardening company wrote for “seeds or clippings,” as did several individuals. Finally, a science editor of the Christian Science Monitor wrote an article “exposing” my “hoax.” According to this article, you can tell from the shadows cast by the plant and model that at least eight hours elapsed during the growth!
Reactions From Irate Scientists
Another type of reaction came from a few angry scientists, one a botanist from a great eastern university who somehow imagined that I had taken in the editor of Scientific Monthly.
He wrote a long rambling polemic denouncing me as a “dull-witted chemist,” demanded an apology in print, and so on, sending copies of this letter to the entire board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as to the director of my college.
He also threatened to arouse the scientific world of England unless his wounds were solved. (He has probably done so by now.)
Most scientists, however, reacted as I had anticipated and wrote charmingly witty letters to me and Scientific Monthly.
Many claimed to own copies of the Handbuch der Yucca and offered their eyewitness accounts of the Schuss-yucca.
Two pages of these letters appeared in the November issue of Scientific Monthly and two more in the January (1953) issue. Hugo Gernsback, the popular science and science fiction publisher, described his “recent research into the Schuss-yucca.”
A Rare Substance
According to his published letter, I had not seen the “Illustrated second edition” of the Ilandbuch published by “Schmutzig und Dreckig Verlag” (Dirty and Filthy edition), which tells how two French scientists visited Chilao Flat in 1911, using French pigs (instead of deer) to guide them.
The reason for the rapid growth of the Schuss-yucca, says Mr. Gernsback, is that the rattlesnakes bite the plant’s roots, injecting some potent enzymes into them.
Another botanist gave the reason for the rapid growth that the Chilao region is a solid mass of ERUNAM, a rare substance. (To get the full impact of the humor here, one must read the word backward.)
Still, another botanist studied my photographs using a microscope with a “10 IQ ocular and a Schlitz psychosomatic amber objective.”
A Pasadena newspaper man wrote that a Schuss-yucca had knocked out a young pugilist and gave up the prize ring “in favor of a career as a cordwainer’s assistant,” saying, “Any time a bush can lay me out cold, I know prize fighting (sic) ain’t for me.”
I had taken a sixth photograph showing the dead yucca stalk with the model looking on in horror. It was published in the January issue with a letter stating that I had withheld the picture “out of deference to the American tradition of the happy ending.”
Seeing the beautiful yucca suddenly wither and die, the model fainted and had to be revived with “two jiggers of antivenin.”
Moral From The Schussyucea
One moral to be drawn from the Schussyucea is that many people will (and do) believe anything, no matter how fantastic, particularly if they see it in print.
In unscrupulous hands, the press can (and does) convince people of any nonsense.
It is not difficult to see why a country without a free press can control its people, why the Russians believe the Lysenko genetic theory and denounce Linus Pauling’s theories of chemical resonance, and can make people believe that slavery is freedom.
Another moral is that many people just don’t have a sense of humor.
44659 by Gustav Albrecht