Yucca at White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, circa 1940

About this postcard

A single soapweed yucca stands in the foreground, its dense rosette of stiff green leaves rising above the pale gypsum sand, with low dunes and a soft pink-and-blue sky behind it. The card's own caption identifies the setting as White Sands National Monument, New Mexico, a field of brilliant white gypsum dunes in the Tularosa Basin that was proclaimed a national monument in 1933. Yuccas such as this are characteristic desert plants of the region, and the monument later became White Sands National Park in 2019.