Joshua

Joshua has held the pose for centuries. Mormon pioneers crossing the Mojave named his kind for the biblical Joshua, arms raised to the heavens — and he has never lowered them since. The Dr.-Seuss silhouette, all angles and uplifted branches, is a prayer the desert wind has tried for a hundred years to interrupt. It has not succeeded. "People ask what I am praying for," he says. "Rain, mostly. The desert teaches specificity." His white blooms open for the yucca moth and nothing else — one of the oldest partnerships on Earth, moth and tree, each useless without the other. The Desert Court respects the pose the way soldiers respect a salute: it costs nothing to hold and everything to break. On the stillest nights, the young trees swear his arms rise a fraction higher. Toward what, he will not say.