Some popular education would seem to be desirable. And this applies, too, to the cacti, for there is more misinformation about them than anything else that grows, runs, or creeps—except rattlesnakes. The clever people who design travel folders and pictorial maps almost always put saguaros in New Mexico. But saguaros do not grow in New Mexico. That is final! And the yucca is not a cactus. That also is final. Nor yet the ocotillo—that defiant, splendid denizen of the desert which flaunts the scarlet torch of flowers. The question that is always on the surface as one writes of plant life in the Southwest is, “Who wants to know?” The picnicker wants to know the names—and nothing much besides—of the wild flowers. My friend the cowman already has the names; that is, the common ones. If I chance to mention blue grama grass, he gently corrects me, “black grama.” Then if I mention black grama, he says, “no, white grama.” But at least he is concerned about something more important than nonscientific names. He wants to know if the plant is something that a lean old cow can eat, whether it stays green in winter, and if it will hold the soil in place. The tourist who pilots car and passengers some six hundred miles between breakfast and bedtime asks only what he was looking at. The rest of us who go into the mountains often enough to be impressed by the layer-cake succession of plants on their slopes can, with the aid of some reading, amass a store of knowledge where others amass only mileage. On a tour, it is mileage or knowledge. One has to choose. Actually, our New Mexico desert is not dominated by sage. That honor is held by the creosote bush, called by some of the old-timers _greasewood_, _Covillea glutinosa_, by some of the scientists—along with five other synonyms. Like the mesquite with which it shares the same general habitat but _does not intermix_, it occupies an immense spread of territory, roughly from Texas to California. Since no livestock will eat it and the ground it occupies is equally useless for agriculture because of aridity and stoniness, creosote is a veritable coyote for survival. The traveler descending from Taos to Santa Fe need not look for it. The sage of that locality, which gives the landscape its singularly mournful aspect, is a true sage. With good reason the cowboys call it _black sage_.