The horse bean or retama, native to the valleys of the lower Rio Grande and Colorado River, is a small graceful pod-bearing tree of drooping branches set with strong spines, long leaf-stems, branching and set with many pairs of tiny leaflets.
The bright yellow, fragrant flowers are almost perennial. In Texas the tree is out of bloom only in midwinter. In the tropics, it is ever-blooming. The fruit hangs in graceful racemes, dark orange-brown in color, and compressed between the remote beans. As a hedge and ornamental garden plant, this tree has no equal in the Southwest. It is met with in cultivation in most warm countries.
The Texas ebony is a beautiful, acacia-like tree of southern Texas and Mexico. One of the commonest and most beautiful trees on the bluffs along the coast, south of the Rio Grande. Its leaves are feathery, fern-like, its flowers in creamy clusters, its pods thick, almost as large as those of the honey locust. The seeds are palatable and nutritious, green or ripe. Immature, the pods are cooked like string beans; ripe, they are roasted, and the pods themselves are ground and used as a substitute for coffee.
The wood is valuable in fine cabinet work, and because it is almost indestructible in contact with the ground, it is largely used for fence posts. It makes superior fuel. Besides being more valuable than any other tree of the Rio Grande Valley, though it rarely exceeds thirty feet in height, it is worthy of the attention of gardeners as well as foresters in all warm temperate countries. Prof. Sargent calls it the finest ornamental tree native to Texas.
The frijolito or coral-bean is a small, slender narrow-headed tree, with persistent, locust-like leaves, fragrant violet-blue flowers, and small one-sided racemes. The pods are silky white, pencil-like, constricted between the bright scarlet seeds. The tree grows wild in canyons in southern Texas and New Mexico, forming thickets or small groves in low moist limestone soil and stream borders. It is a close relative of the famous pagoda tree of Japan, _S. Japonica_, universally cultivated; and it deserves to be a garden tree throughout the Southern states.
A single genus, _acer_, includes from sixty to seventy species, widely distributed over the Northern Hemisphere. A single species goes south of the equator, to the mountains of Java. All produce pale close-grained, fairly hard wood, valued in turnery and for the interior finish of houses. The clear sap of some American species is made into maple sugar.