WHEN California was wild, it
was the floweriest part of the continent. And perhaps it is so still,
notwithstanding the lowland flora has in great part vanished before the
farmers' flocks and ploughs. So exuberant was the bloom of the main valley
of the state, it would still have been extravagantly rich had ninety-nine
out of every hundred of its crowded flowers been taken away, - far flowerier
than the beautiful prairies of Illinois and Wisconsin, or the savannas of
the Southern states. In the early spring it was a smooth, evenly planted
sheet of purple and gold, one mass of bloom more than four hundred miles
long, with scarce a green leaf in sight.
Still more interesting is the
rich and wonderfully varied flora of the mountains. Going up the Sierra
across the Yosemite Park to the Summit peaks, thirteen thousand feet high,
you find as much variety in the vegetation as in the scenery. Change
succeeds change with bewildering rapidity, for in a few days you pass
through as many climates and floras, ranged one above another, as you would
in walking along the lowlands to the Arctic Ocean.
And to the variety due to climate there is added
that caused by the topographical features of the different regions. Again,
the vegetation is profoundly varied by the peculiar distribution of the soil
and moisture. Broad and deep moraines, ancient and well weathered, are
spread over the lower regions, rough and comparatively recent and
unweathered moraines over the middle and upper regions, alternating with
bare ridges and domes and glacier-polished pavements, the highest in the icy
recesses of the peaks, raw and shifting, some of them being still in process
of formation, and of course scarcely planted as yet.
Besides these main soil-beds there are many
others comparatively small, reformations of both glacial and weather-soils,
sifted, sorted out, and deposited by running water and the wind on gentle
slopes and in all sorts of hollows, potholes, valleys, lake basins, etc.,
some in dry and breezy situations, others sheltered and kept moist by lakes,
streams, and waftings of waterfall spray, making comfortable homes for
plants widely varied. In general, glaciers give soil to high and low places
almost alike, while water currents are dispensers of special blessings,
constantly tending to make the ridges poorer and the valleys richer.
Glaciers mingle all kinds of material together, mud particles and boulders
fifty feet in diameter: water, whether in oozing currents or passionate
torrents, discriminates both in the size and shape of the material it
carries. Glacier mud is the finest meal ground for any use in the Park, and
its transportation into lakes and as foundations for flowery garden meadows
was the first work that the young rivers were called on to do. Bogs occur
only in shallow alpine basins where the climate is cool enough for sphagnum,
and where the surrounding topographical conditions are such that they are
safe, even in the most copious rains and thaws, from the action of flood
currents capable of carrying rough gravel and sand, but where the water
supply is nevertheless constant. The mosses dying from year to year
gradually give rise to those rich spongy peat-beds in which so many of our
best alpine plants delight to dwell. The strong winds that occasionally
sweep the high Sierra play a more important part in the distribution of
special soil-beds than is at first sight recognized, carrying forward
considerable quantities of sand and gravel, flakes of mica, etc., and
depositing them in fields and beds beautifully ruffled and embroidered and
adapted to the wants of some of the hardiest and handsomest of the alpine
shrubs and flowers. The more resisting of the smooth, solid,
glacier-polished domes and ridges can hardly be said to have any soil at
all, while others beginning to give way to the weather are thinly sprinkled
with coarse angular gravel. Some of them are full of crystals, which as the
surface of the rock is decomposed are set free, covering the summits and
rolling down the sides in minute avalanches, giving rise to zones and beds
of crystalline soil. In some instances the various crystals occur only here
and there, sprinkled in the gray gravel like daisies in a sod; but in others
half or more is made up of crystals, and the glow of the imbedded or loosely
strewn gems and their colored gleams and glintings at different times of the
day when the sun is shining might well exhilarate the flowers that grow
among them, and console them for being so completely outshone.
These radiant sheets and belts and dome-
encircling rings of crystals are the most beautiful of all the Sierra
soil-beds, while the huge taluses ranged along the walls of the great canons
are the deepest and roughest. Instead of being slowly weathered and
accumulated from the cliffs overhead like common taluses, they were all
formed suddenly and simultaneously by an earthquake that occurred at least
three centuries ago. Though thus hurled into existence at a single effort,
they are the least changeable and destructible of all the soil formations in
the range. Excepting those which were launched directly into the channels of
rivers, scarcely one of their wedged and interlocked boulders has been moved
since the day of their creation, and though mostly made up of huge angular
blocks of granite, many of them from ten to fifty feet cube, trees and
shrubs make out to live and thrive on them, and even delicate herbaceous
plants, - draperia, collomia, zauschneria, etc., - soothing their rugged
features with gardens and groves. In general views of the Park scarce a hint
is given of its floral wealth. Only by patiently, lovingly sauntering about
in it will you discover that it is all more or less flowery, the forests as
well as the open spaces, and the mountain tops and rugged slopes around the
glaciers as well as the sunny meadows.
Even the majestic caņon cliffs, seemingly
absolutely flawless for thousands of feet and necessarily doomed to eternal
sterility, are cheered with happy flowers on invisible niches and ledges
wherever the slightest grip for a root can be found; as if Nature, like an
enthusiastic gardener, could not resist the temptation to plant flowers
everywhere. On high, dry rocky summits and plateaus, most of the plants are
so small they make but little show even when in bloom. But in the opener
parts of the main forests, the meadows, stream banks, and the level floors
of Yosemite valleys the vegetation is exceedingly rich in flowers, some of
the lilies and larkspurs being from eight to ten feet high. And on the upper
meadows there are miles of blue gentians and daisies, white and blue
violets; and great breadths of rosy purple heathworts covering rocky
moraines with a marvelous abundance of bloom, enlivened by hummingbirds,
butterflies and a host of other insects as beautiful as flowers. In the
lower and middle regions, also, many of the most extensive beds of bloom are
in great part made by shrubs, - adenostoma, manzanita, ceanothus, chamebatia,
cherry, rose, rubus, spiraa, shad, laurel, azalea, honeysuckle, calycanthus,
ribes, philadeiphus, and many others, the sunny spaces about them bright and
fragrant with mints, lupines, geraniums, lilies, daisies, goldenrods,
castilleias, gilias, pentstemons, etc.
Adenostoma fasciculatum is a handsome, hardy,
heathlike shrub belonging to the rose family, flourishing on dry ground
below the pine belt, and often covering areas of twenty or thirty square
miles of rolling sun-beaten hills and dales with a dense, dark green, almost
impenetrable chaparral, which in the distance looks like Scotch heather. It
is about six to eight feet high, has slender elastic branches, red shreddy
bark, needle-shaped leaves, and small white flowers in panicles about a foot
long, making glorious sheets of fragrant bloom in the spring. To running
fires it offers no resistance, vanishing with the few other flowery shrubs
and vines and liliaceous plants that grow with it about as fast as dry
grass, leaving nothing but ashes. But with wonderful vigor it rises again
and again in fresh beauty from the root, and calls back to its hospitable
mansions the multitude of wild animals that had to flee for their lives.
As soon as you enter the pine woods you meet the
charming little Chamathatia foliolosa, one of the handsomest of the Park
shrubs, next in fineness and beauty to the heathworts of the alpine regions.
Like adenostoma it belongs to the rose family, is from twelve to eighteen
inches high, has brown bark, slender branches, white flowers like those of
the strawberry, and thrice-pinnate glandular, yellow-green leaves, finely
cut and fernlike, as if unusual pains had been taken in fashioning them.
Where there is plenty of sunshine at an elevation of three thousand to six
thousand feet, it makes a close, continuous growth, leaf touching leaf over
hundreds of acres, spreading a handsome mantie beneath the yellow and sugar
pines. Here and there a lily rises above it, an arching bunch of tall bromus,
and at wide intervals a rosebush or clump of ceanothus or manzanita, but
there are no rough weeds mixed with it, - no roughness of any sort.
Perhaps the most widely distributed of all the
Park shrubs and of the Sierra in general, certainly the most strikingly
characteristic, are the many species of manzanita (Arctostaph ylos). Though
one species, the Um-ursi, or bearberry, - the kinikinic of the Western
Indians, - extends around the world, the greater part of them are
Californian. They are mostly from four to ten feet high, round- headed, with
innumerable branches, brown or red bark, pale green leaves set on edge, and
a rich profusion of small, pink, narrow-throated, urn-shaped flowers like
those of arbutus. The branches are knotty, zigzaggy, and about as rigid as
bones, and the bark is so thin and smooth, both trunk and branches seem to
be naked, looking as if they had been peeled, polished, and painted red. The
wood also is red, hard, and heavy.
These grand bushes seldom fail to engage the
attention of the traveler and hold it, especially if he has to pass through
closely planted fields of them such as grow on moraine slopes at an
elevation of about seven thousand feet, and in canons choked with earthquake
boulders; for they make the most uncompromisingly stubborn of all chaparral.
Even bears take pains to go around the stoutest patches if possible, and
when compelled to force a passage leave tufts of hair and broken branches to
mark their way, while less skillful mountaineers under like circumstances
sometimes lose most of their clothing and all their temper.
The manzanitas like sunny ground. On warm ridges
and sandy flats at the foot of sun- beaten caņon cliffs, some of the tallest
specimens have well-defined trunks six inches to a foot or more thick, and
stand apart in orchard- like growths which in bloomtime are among the finest
garden sights in the Park. The largest I ever saw had a round, slightly
fluted trunk nearly four feet in diameter, which at a height of only
eighteen inches from the ground dissolved into a wilderness of branches,
rising and spreading to a height and width of about twelve feet. In spring
every bush over all the mountains is covered with rosy flowers, in autumn
with fruit. The red pleasantly acid berries, about the size of peas, are
like little apples, and the hungry mountaineer is glad to eat them, though
half their bulk is made up of hard seeds. Indians, bears, coyotes, foxes,
birds, and other mountain people live on them for months.
Associated with manzanita there are six or seven
species of ceanothus, flowery, fragrant, and altogether delightful shrubs,
growing in glorious abundance in the forests on sunny or half-shaded ground,
up to an elevation of about nine thousand feet above the sea. In the
sugar-pine woods the most beautiful species is C. integerrimus, often called
California lilac, or deer brush. It is five or six feet high, smooth,
slender, willowy, with bright foliage and abundance of blue flowers in
close, showy panicles. Two species, prostratus and procumbens, spread
handsome blue-flowered mats and rugs on warm ridges beneath the pines, and
offer delightful beds to the tired mountaineers. The commonest species, C.
cordulatus, is mostly restricted to the silver fir belt. It is white-
flowered and thorny, and makes extensive thickets of tangled chaparral, far
too dense to wade through, and too deep and loose to walk on, though it is
pressed flat every winter by ten or fifteen feet of snow.
Above these thorny beds, sometimes mixed with
them, a very wild, red-fruited cherry grows in magnificent tangles, fragrant
and white as snow when in bloom. The fruit is small and rather bitter, not
so good as the black, puckery chokecherry that grows in the canons, but
thrushes, robins, chipmunks like it. Below the cherry tangles, chinquapin
and goldcup oak spread generous mantles of chaparral, and with hazel and
ribes thickets in adjacent glens help to clothe and adorn the rocky
wilderness, and produce food for the many mouths Nature has to fill. Azalea
occidentalis is the glory of cool streams and meadows. It is from two to
five feet high, has bright green leaves and a rich profusion of large,
fragrant white and yellow flowers, which are in prime beauty in June, July,
and August, according to the elevation (from three thousand to six thousand
feet). Only the purple-flowered rhododendron of the redwood forests rivals
or surpasses it in superb abounding bloom.
Back a little way from the azalea-bordered
streams, a small wild rose makes thickets, often several acres in extent,
deliciously fragrant on dewy mornings and after showers, the fragrance
mingled with the music of birds nesting in them. And not far from these rose
gardens Rubus Nutkanus covers the ground with broad velvety leaves and pure
white flowers as large as those of its neighbor the rose, and finer in
texture; followed at the end of summer by soft red berries good for bird and
beast and man also. This is the commonest and the most beautiful of the
whole blessed flowery fruity genus.
The glory of the alpine region in bloomtime are
the heathworts, cassiope, bryanthus, kalmia, and vaccinium, enriched here
and there by the alpine honeysuckle, Lonicera conjugialis, and by the
purple-flowered Primula suffrulicosa, the only primrose discovered in
California, and the only shrubby species in the genus. The lowly, hardy,
adventurous cassiope has exceedingly slender creeping branches, scalelike
leaves, and pale pink or white waxen bell flowers. Few plants, large or
small, so well endure hard weather and rough ground over so great a range.
In July it spreads a wavering, interrupted belt of the loveliest bloom
around glacier lakes and meadows and across wild moory expanses, between
roaring streams, all along the Sierra, and northward beneath cold skies by
way of the mountain chains of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and
Alaska, to the Arctic regions; gradually descending, until at the north end
of the continent it reaches the level of the sea; blooming as profusely and
at about the same time on mossy frozen tundras as on the high Sierra
moraines. Bryanthus,
the companion of cassiope, accompanies it as far north as southeastern
Alaska, where together they weave thick plushy beds on rounded mountain tops
above the glaciers. It grows mostly at slightly lower elevations; the upper
margin of what may be called the bryanthus belt in the Sierra uniting with
and overlapping the lower margin of the cassiope. The wide bell-shaped
flowers are bright purple, about three fourths of an inch in diameter,
hundreds to the square yard, the young branches, mostly erect, being covered
with them. No Highlander in heather enjoys more luxurious rest than the
Sierra mountaineer in a bed of blooming bryanthus. And imagine the show on
calm dewy mornings, when there is a radiant globe in the throat of every
flower, and smaller gems on the needle- shaped leaves, the sunbeams pouring
through them. In the
same wild, cold region the tiny Vaccinium myrtillus, mixed with kalmia and
dwarf willows, spreads thinner carpets, the down- pressed matted leaves
profusely sprinkled with pink bells; and on higher sandy slopes you will
find several alpine species of eriogonum with gorgeous bossy masses of
yellow bloom, and the lovely Arctic daisy with many blessed companions;
charming plants, gentle mountaineers, Nature's darlings, which seem always
the finer the higher and stormier their homes.
Many interesting ferns are
distributed over the Park from the foothills to a little above the timber
line. The greater number are rock ferns, pelha, cheilanthes, polypodium,
adianturn, woodsia, cryptogramme, etc., with small tufted fronds, lining
glens and gorges and fringing the cliffs and moraines. The most important of
the larger species are woodwardia, aspidium, asplenium, and the common
pteris. Woodwardia radicans is a superb fern five to eight feet high,
growing in vaseike clumps where the ground is level, and on slopes in a
regular thatch, frond over frond, like shingles on a roof. Its range in the
Park is from the western boundary up to about five thousand feet, mostly on
benches of the north walls of canons watered by small outspread streams. It
is far more abundant in the Coast Mountains beneath the noble redwoods,
where it attains a height of ten to twelve feet. The aspidiums are mostly
restricted to the moist parts of the lower forests, Aspienium flux-Icemina
to marshy streams. The hardy, broad- shouldered Pteris aquilina, the
commonest of ferns, grows tall and graceful on sunny flats and hillsides, at
elevations between three thousand and six thousand feet. Those who know it
only in the Eastern states can form no fair conception of its stately beauty
in the sunshine of the Sierra. On the level sandy floors of Yosemite valleys
it often attains a height of six to eight feet in fields thirty or forty
acres in extent, the magnificent fronds outspread in a nearly horizontal
position, forming a ceiling beneath which one may walk erect in delightful
mellow shade. No other fern does so much for the color glory of autumn, with
its browns and reds and yellows changing and inter- blending. Even after
lying dead all winter beneath the snow it spreads a lively brown mantle over
the desolate ground, until the young fronds with a noble display of faith
and hope come rolling up into the light through the midst of the beautiful
ruins. A few weeks suffice for their development, then, gracefully poised
each in its place, they manage themselves in every exigency of weather as if
they had passed through a long course of training. I have seen solemn old
sugar pines thrown into momentary confusion by the sudden onset of a storm,
tossing their arms excitedly as if scarce awake, and wondering what had
happened, but I never noticed surprise or embarrassment in the behavior of
this noble pteris. Of
five species of pella in the Park, the handsome andromedxrfolia, growing in
brushy foothills with Adiantum emarginatum, is the largest. P. Breweri, the
hardiest and at the same time the most fragile of the genus, grows in dense
tufts among rocks on storm-beaten mountain sides along the upper margin of
the fern line. It is a charming little fern, four or five inches high, has
shining bronze-colored stalks which are about as brittle as glass, and pale
green pinnate fronds. Its companions on the lower part of its range are Cry
ptogramme acrostichoides and Phegopteris alpestris, the latter soft and
tender, not at all like a rock fern, though it grows on rocks where the snow
lies longest. P. Bridgesii, with blue-green, narrow, simply pinnate fronds,
is about the same size as Breweri and ranks next to it as a mountaineer,
growing in fissures and around boulders on glacier pavements. About a
thousand feet lower we find the smaller and more abundant P. densa, on
ledges and boulder- strewn fissured pavements, watered until late in summer
by oozing currents from snow-banks or thin outspread streams from moraines,
growing in close sods,—its little bright green triangular tripinnate fronds,
about an inch in length, as innumerable as leaves of grass. P. ornithopus
has twice or thrice pinnate fronds, is dull in color, and dwells on hot
rocky hill-sides among chaparral.
Three species of cheilanthes, - Californica,
gracillima, and myriophylla, with beautiful two to four pinnate fronds, an
inch to five inches long, adorn the stupendous walls of the canons, however
dry and sheer. The exceedingly delicate and interesting Californica is rare,
the others abundant at from three thousand to seven thousand feet elevation,
and are often accompanied by the little gold fern, Gymnogramme triangularis,
and rarely by the curious little Botrychium simplex, the smallest of which
are less than an inch high.
The finest of all the rock ferns is Adiantum
pedatum, lover of waterfalls and the lightest waftings of irised spray. No
other Sierra fern is so constant a companion of white spray- covered
streams, or tells so well their wild thundering music. The homes it loves
best are cave-like hollows beside the main falls, where it can float its
plumes on their dewy breath, safely sheltered from the heavy spray-laden
blasts. Many of these moss-lined chambers, so cool, so moist, and brightly
colored with rainbow light, contain thousands of these happy ferns, clinging
to the emerald walls by the slightest holds, reaching out the most
wonderfully delicate fingered fronds on dark glossy stalks, sensitive,
tremulous, all alive, in an attitude of eager attention; throbbing in unison
with every motion and tone of the resounding waters, compliant to their
faintest impulses, moving each division of the frond separately at times as
if fingering the music, playing on invisible keys.
Considering the lilies as you go up the
mountains, the first you come to is L. Pardalinum, with large orange-yellow,
purple-spotted flowers big enough for babies' bonnets. It is seldom found
higher than thirty-five hundred feet above the sea, grows in magnificent
groups of fifty to a hundred or more, in romantic waterfall dells in the
pine woods shaded by overarching maple and willow, alder and dogwood, with
bushes in front of the embowering trees for a border, and ferns and sedges
in front of the bushes; while the bed of black humus in which the bulbs are
set is carpeted with mosses and liverworts. These richly furnished lily
gardens are the pride of the falls on the lower tributaries of the Tuolumne
and Merced rivers, falls not like those of Yosemite valleys, - coming from
the sky with rock-shaking thunder tones, - but small, with low, kind voices
cheerily singing in calm leafy bowers, self-contained, keeping their snowy
skirts well about them, yet furnishing plenty of spray for the lilies.
The Washington lily (L. Washingtonianum) is
white, deliciously fragrant, moderate in size, with three to ten flowered
racemes. The largest I ever measured was eight feet high, the raceme two
feet long, with fifty-two flowers, fifteen of them open; the others had
faded or were still in the bud. This famous lily is distributed over the
sunny portions of the sugar- pine woods, never in large garden companies
like pardalinum, but widely scattered, standing up to the waist in dense
ceanothus and manzanita chaparral, waving its lovely flowers above the
blooming wilderness of brush, and giving their fragrance to the breeze.
These stony, thorny jungles are about the last places in the mountains in
which one would look for lilies. But though they toil not nor spin, like
other people under adverse circumstances, they have to do the best they can.
Because their large bulbs are good to eat they are dug up by Indians and
bears; therefore, like hunted animals, they seek refuge in the chaparral,
where among the boulders and tough tangled roots they are comparatively
safe. This is the favorite Sierra lily, and it is now growing in all the
best parks and gardens of the world.
The showiest gardens in the Park lie imbedded in
the silver fir forests on the top of the main dividing ridges or hang like
gayly colored scarfs down their sides. Their wet places are in great part
taken up by veratrum, a robust broad-leaved plant determined to be seen, and
babenaria and spiranthes; the drier parts by tall columbines, larkspurs,
castilleias, lupines, hosackias, erigerons, valerian, etc., standing deep in
grass, with violets here and there around the borders. But the finest
feature of these forest gardens is Lilium parvum. It varies greatly in size,
the tallest being from six to nine feet high, with splendid racemes of ten
to fifty small orange-colored flowers, which rock and wave with great
dignity above the other flowers in the infrequent winds that fall over the
protecting wall of trees. Though rather frail-looking it is strong, reaching
prime vigor and beauty eight thousand feet above the sea, and in some places
venturing as high as eleven thousand.
Calochortus, or Mariposa tulip, is a unique
genus of many species confined to the California side of the continent;
charming plants, somewhat resembling the tulips of Europe, but far finer.
The richest calochortus region lies below the western boundary of the Park;
still five or six species are included. C. Nuttallii is common on moraines
in the forests of the two- leaved pine; and C. ccrruleus and nudus, very
slender, lowly species, may be found in moist garden spots near Yosemite. C.
albus, with pure white flowers, growing in shady places among the foothill
shrubs, is, I think, the very loveliest of all the lily family, -a spotless
soul, plant saint, that every one must love and so be made better. It puts
the wildest mountaineer on his good behavior. With this plant the whole
world would seem rich though none other existed. Next after Caiochorlvs,
Brodiaa is the most, interesting genus. Nearly all the many species have
beautiful showy heads of blue, lilac, and yellow flowers, enriching the
gardens of the lower pine region. Other liliaceous plants likely to attract
attention are the blue-flowered camassia, the bulbs of which are prized as
food by Indians; fritillaria, smilacina, chioragalum, and the twining
climbing stropholirion.
The common orchidaceous plants are corallorhiza,
goodyera, spiranthes, and habenaria. Cypripedium montanum, the only moccasin
flower I have seen in the Park, is a handsome, thoughtful-looking plant
living beside cool brooks. The large oval lip is white, delicately veined
with purple; the other petals and sepals purple, strap-shaped, and elegantly
curved and twisted. To
tourists the most attractive of all the flowers of the forest is the snow
plant (Sarcodes san guinea). It is a bright red, fleshy, succulent pillar
that pushes up through the dead needles in the pine and fir woods like a
gigantic asparagus shoot. The first intimation of its coming is a loosening
and upbulging of the brown stratum of decomposed needles on the forest
floor, in the cracks of which you notice fiery gleams; presently a blunt
dome-shaped head an inch or two in diameter appears, covered with closely
imbricated scales and bracts. In a week or so it grows to a height of six to
twelve inches. Then the long fringed bracts spread and curl aside, allowing
the twenty or thirty five-lobed bell-shaped flowers to open and look
straight out from the fleshy axis. It is said to grow up through the snow;
on the contrary it always waits until the ground is warm, though with other
early flowers it is occasionally buried or half buried for a day or two by
spring storms. The entire plant- flowers, bracts, stem, scales, and roots -
is red. But notwithstanding its glowing color and beautiful flowers, it is
singularly unsympathetic and cold. Everybody admires it as a wonderful
curiosity, but nobody loves it. Without fragrance, rooted in decaying
vegetable matter, it stands beneath the pines and firs lonely, silent, and
about as rigid as a graveyard monument.
Down in the main caflons adjoining the azalea
and rose gardens there are fine beds of herbaceous plants, - tall mints and
sunflowers, iris, cenothera, brodiaa, and bright beds of erythraa on the
ferny meadows. Bolandera, sedum, and airy, feathery, purple-flowered
heuchera adorn mossy nooks near falls, the shading trees wreathed and
festooned with wild grapevines and clematis; while lightly shaded flats are
covered with gilia and eunanus of many species, hosackia, arnica, chnactis,
gayophytum, gnaphalium, monardella, etc.
Thousands of the most interesting gardens in the
Park are never seen, for they are small and lie far up on ledges and
terraces of the sheer caņon walls, wherever a strip of soil, however narrow
and shallow, can rest. The birds, winds, and down-washing rains have planted
them with all sorts of hardy mountain flowers, and where there is sufficient
moisture they flourish in profusion. Many of them are watered by little
streams that seem lost on the tremendous precipices, clinging to the face of
the rock in lacelike strips, and dripping from ledge to ledge, too silent to
be called falls, pathless wanderers from the upper meadows, which for
centuries have been seeking a way down to the rivers they belong to, without
having worn as yet any appreciable channel, mostly evaporated or given to
the plants they meet before reaching the foot of the cliffs. To these
unnoticed streams the finest of the cliff gardens owe their luxuriance and
freshness of beauty. In the larger ones ferns and showy flowers flourish in
wonderful profusion, - woodwardia, columbine, collomia, castilleia, draperia,
geranium, erythra, pink and scarlet mimulus, hosackia, saxifrage, sunflowers
and daisies, with azalea, spirea, and calycanthus, a few specimens of each
that seem to have been culled from the large gardens above and beneath them.
Even lilies are occasionally found in these irrigated cliff gardens,
swinging their bells over the giddy precipices, seemingly as happy as their
relatives down in the waterfall dells. Most of the cliff gardens, however,
are dependent on summer showers, and though from the shallowness of the
soil-beds they are often dry, they still display a surprising number of
bright flowers, - scarlet zauschneria, purple bush pentstemon, mints, gilias,
and bosses of glowing golden bahia. Nor is there any lack of commoner
plants; the homely yarrow is often found in them, and sweet clover and
honeysuckle for the bees.
In the upper canons, where the walls are
inclined at so low an angle that they are loaded with moraine material,
through which perennial streams percolate in broad diffused currents, there
are long wavering garden beds, that seem to be descending through the forest
like cascades, their fluent lines suggesting motion, swaying from side to
side of the forested banks, surging up here and there over island-like
boulder piles, or dividing and flowing around them. In some of these floral
cascades the vegetation is chiefly sedges and grasses ruffled with willows;
in others, showy flowers like those of the lily gardens on the main divides.
Another curious and picturesque series of wall gardens are made by thin
streams that ooze slowly from moraines and slip gently over smooth glaciated
slopes. From particles of sand and mud they carry, a pair of lobe- shaped
sheets of soil an inch or two thick are gradually formed, one of them
hanging down from the brow of the slope, the other leaning up from the foot
of it, like stalactite and stalagmite, the soil being held together by the
flowery, moisture-loving plants growing in it.
Along the rocky parts of the caņon bottoms
between lake basins, where the streams flow fast over glacier-polished
granite, there are rows of pothole gardens full of ferns, daisies,
goldenrods, and other common plants of the neighborhood nicely arranged like
bouquets, and standing out in telling relief on the bare shining rock banks.
And all the way up the caflons to the Summit mountains, wherever there is
soil of any sort, there is no lack of flowers, however short the summer may
be. Within eight or ten feet of a snow bank lingering beneath a shadow, you
may see belated ferns unrolling their fronds in September, and sedges
hurrying up their brown spikes on ground that has been free from snow only
eight or ten days, and likely to be covered again within a few weeks; the
winter in the coolest of these shadow gardens being about eleven months
long, while spring, summer, and autumn are hurried and crowded into one
month. Again, under favorable conditions, alpine gardens three or four
thousand feet higher than the last are in their prime in June. Between the
Summit peaks at the head of the canons surprising effects are produced where
the sunshine falls direct on rocky slopes and reverberates among boulders.
Toward the end of August, in one of these natural hothouses on the north
shore of a glacier lake eleven thousand five hundred feet above the sea, I
found a luxuriant growth of hairy lupines, thistles, goldenrods, shrubby
potentilla, spraguea, and the mountain epilobium with thousands of purple
flowers an inch wide, while the opposite shore, at a distance of only three
hundred yards, was bound in heavy avalanche snow, - flowery summer on one
side, winter on the other. And I know a bench garden on the north wall of
Yosemite in which a few flowers are in bloom all winter; the massive rocks
about it storing up sunshine enough in summer to melt the snow about as fast
as it falls. When tired of the confinement of my cabin I used to camp out in
it in January, and never failed to find flowers, and butterflies also,
except during snowstorms and a few days after.
From Yosemite one can easily walk in a day to
the top of Mount Hoffman, a massive gray mountain that rises in the center
of the Park, with easy slopes adorned with castellated piles and crests on
the south side, rugged precipices banked with perpetual snow on the north.
Most of the broad summit is comparatively level and smooth, and covered with
crystals of quartz, mica, hornblende, feldspar, garnet, zircon, tourmaline,
etc., weathered out and strewn loosely as if sown broadcast; their radiance
so dazzling in some places as to fairly hide the multitude of small flowers
that grow among them; myriads of keen lance rays infinitely fine, white or
colored, making an almost continuous glow over all the ground, with here and
there throbbing, spangling lilies of light, on the larger gems. At first
sight only these crystal sunflowers are noticed, but looking closely you
discover minute gilias, ivesias, eunanus, phloxes, etc., in thousands,
showing more petals than leaves; and larger plants in hollows and on the
borders of rills, - lupines, potentillas, daisies, harebells, mountain
columbine, astragalus, fringed with heathworts. You wander about from garden
to garden enchanted, as if walking among stars, gathering the brightest
gems, each and all apparently doing their best with eager enthusiasm, as if
everything depended on faithful shining; and considering the flowers basking
in the glorious light, many of them looking like swarms of small moths and
butterflies that were resting after long dances in the sunbeams. Now your
attention is called to colonies of woodchucks and pikas, the mounds in front
of their burrows glittering like heaps of jewelry, - romantic ground to live
in or die in. Now you look abroad over the vast round landscape bounded by
the down-curving sky, nearly all the Park in it displayed like a map, -
forests, meadows, lakes, rock waves, and snowy mountains. Northward lies the
basin of Yosemite Creek, paved with bright domes and lakes like larger
crystals; eastward, the meadowy, billowy Tuolumne region and the Summit
peaks in glorious array; southward, Yosemite; and westward, the boundless
forests. On no other mountain that I know of are you more likely to linger.
It is a magnificent camp ground. Clumps of dwarf pine furnish rosiny roots
and branches for fuel, and the rills pure water. Around your camp-fire the
flowers seem to be looking eagerly at the light, and the crystals shine
unweariedly, making fine company as you lie at rest in the very heart of the
vast, serene, majestic night.
The finest of the glacier meadow gardens lie at
an elevation of about nine thousand feet, imbedded in the upper pine forests
like lakes of light. They are smooth and level, a mile or two long, and the
rich, well-drained ground is completely covered with a soft, silky, plushy
sod enameled with flowers, not one of which is in the least weedy or coarse.
In some places the sod is so crowded with showy flowers that the grasses are
scarce noticed, in others they are rather sparingly scattered; while every
leaf and flower seems to have its winged representative in the swarms of
happy flower-like insects that enliven the air above them.
With the winter snowstorms wings and petals are
folded, and for more than half the year the meadows are snow-buried ten or
fifteen feet deep. In June they begin to thaw out, small patches of the dead
sloppy sod appear, gradually increasing in size until they are free and warm
again, face to face with the sky; myriads of growing points push through the
steaming mould, frogs sing cheeringly, soon joined by the birds, and the
merry insects come back as if suddenly raised from the dead. Soon the ground
is green with mosses and liverworts and dotted with small fungi, making the
first crop of the season. Then the grass leaves weave a new sod, and the
exceedingly slender panicles rise above it like a purple mist, speedily
followed by potentilla, ivesia, bossy orthocarpus, yellow and purple, and a
few pentstemons. Later come the daisies and goldenrods, asters and gentians.
Of the last there are three species, small and fine, with varying tones of
blue, and in glorious abundance, coloring extensive patches where the sod is
shallowest. Through the midst flows a stream only two or three feet wide,
silently gliding as if careful not to disturb the hushed calm of the
solitude, its banks embossed by the common sod bent down to the water's
edge, and trimmed with mosses and violets; slender grass panicles lean over
like miniature pine trees, and here and there on the driest places small
mats of heathworts are neatly spread, enriching without roughening the bossy
down-curling sod. In spring and summer the weather is mostly crisp,
exhilarating sunshine, though magnificent mountain ranges of cumuli are
often upheaved about noon, their shady hollows tinged with purple ineffably
fine, their snowy sun-beaten bosses glowing against the sky, casting cooling
shadows for an hour or two, then dissolving in a quick washing rain. But for
days in succession there are no clouds at all, or only faint wisps and
pencilings scarcely discernible.
Toward the end of August the sunshine grows
hazy, announcing the coming of Indian summer, the outlines of the landscapes
are softened and mellowed, and more and more plainly are the mountains
clothed with light, white tinged with pale purple, richest in the morning
and evening. The warm, brooding days are full of life and thoughts of life
to come, ripening seeds with next summer in them or a hundred summers. The
nights are unspeakably impressive and calm; frost crystals of wondrous
beauty grow on the grass, - each carefully planned and finished as if
intended to endure forever. The sod becomes yellow and brown, but the late
asters and gentians, carefully closing their flowers at night, do not seem
to feel the frost; no nipped, wilted plants of any kind are to be seen; even
the early snowstorms fail to blight them. At last the precious seeds are
ripe, all the work of the season is done, and the sighing pines tell the
coming of winter and rest.
Ascending the range you find that many of the
higher meadows slope considerably, from the amount of loose material washed
into their basins; and sedges and rushes are mixed with the grasses or take
their places, though all are still more or less flowery and bordered with
heathworts, sibbaldea, and dwarf willows. Here and there you come to small
bogs, the wettest smooth and adorned with parnassia and buttercups, others
tussocky and ruffled like bits of Arctic tundra, their mosses and lichens
interwoven with dwarf shrubs. On boulder piles the red iridescent oxyria
abounds, and on sandy, gravelly slopes several species of shrubby,
yellow-flowered eriogonum, some of the plants, less than a foot high, being
very old, a century or more, as is shown by the rings made by the annual
whorls of leaves on the big roots. Above these flower-dotted slopes the gray,
savage wilderness of crags and peaks seems lifeless and bare. Yet all the
way up to the tops of the highest mountains, commonly supposed to be covered
with eternal snow, there are bright garden' spots crowded with flowers,
their warm colors calling to mind the sparks and jets of fire on polar
volcanoes rising above a world of ice. The principal mountam-top plants are
phloxes, drabas, saxifrages, silene, cymopterus, hulsea, and polemonium,
growing in detached stripes and mats, - the highest streaks and splashes of
the summer wave as it breaks against these wintry heights. The most
beautiful are the phloxes (Dotiglasii and ca3spitosum), and the red-flowered
silene, with their innumerable flowers which hide the leaves.
Though herbaceous plants, like the trees and
shrubs, are dwarfed as they ascend, two of these mountain dwellers, Hulsea
algida and Polemonium conferlum, are notable exceptions. The yellow-flowered
hulsea is eight to twelve inches high, stout, erect, - the leaves, three to
six inches long, secreting a rosiny, fragrant gum, standing up boldly on the
grim lichen- stained crags, and never looking in the least tired or
discouraged. Both the ray and disk flowers are yellow; the heads are nearly
two inches wide, and are eagerly sought for by roving bee mountaineers. The
polemonium is quite as luxuriant and tropical-looking as its companion,
about the same height, glandular, fragrant, its blue flowers closely packed
in eight or ten heads, twenty to forty in a head. It is never far from
hulsea, growing at elevations of between eleven and thirteen thousand feet
wherever a little hollow or crevice favorably situated with a handful of
wind-driven soil can be found.
From these frosty Arctic sky gardens you may
descend in one straight swoop to the abronia, mentzelia, and cenothera
gardens of Mono, where the sunshine is warm enough for palms.
But the greatest of all the gardens is the belt
of forest trees, profusely covered in the spring with blue and purple, red
and yellow blossoms, each tree with a gigantic panicle of flowers fifty to a
hundred feet long. Yet strange to say they are seldom noticed. Few travel
through the woods when they are in bloom, the flowers of some of the
showiest species opening before the snow is off the ground. Nevertheless,
one would think the news of such gigantic flowers would quickly spread, and
travelers from all the world would make haste to the show. Eager inquiries
are made for the bloomtime of rhododendron- covered mountains and for the
bloomtime of Yosemite streams, that they may be enjoyed in their prime; but
the far grander outburst of tree bloom covering a thousand mountains -who
inquires about that? That the pistillate flowers of the pines and firs
should escape the eyes of careless lookers is less to be wondered at, since
they mostly grow aloft on the topmost branches, and can hardly be seen from
the foot of the trees. Yet even these make a magnificent show from the top
of an overlooking ridge when the sunbeams are pouring through them. But the
far more numerous staminate flowers of the pines in large rosy clusters, and
those of the silver firs in countless thousands on the under side of the
branches, cannot be hid, stand where you may. The mountain hemlock also is
gloriously colored with a profusion of lovely blue and purple flowers, a
spectacle to gods and men. A single pine or hemlock or silver fir in the
prime of its beauty about the middle of June is well worth the pains of the
longest journey; how much more broad forests of them thousands of miles
long! One of the best
ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get
into close tingling touch with them, and then look abroad. Speaking of the
benefits of tree- climbing, Thoreau says: "I found my account in climbing a
tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got
well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the
horizon which I had never seen before. I might have walked about the foot of
the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have
seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me, - it was near the middle
of June, - on the ends of the topmost branches, a few minute and delicate
red conelike blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking
heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and
showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets, -for it was court
week, - and to farmers and lumbermen and woodchoppers and hunters, and not
one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped
down." The same
marvelous blindness prevails here, although the blossoms are a thousandfold
more abundant and telling. Once when I was collecting flowers of the red
silver fir near a summer tourist resort on the mountains above Lake Tahoe, I
carried a handful of flowery branches to the boarding house, where they
quickly attracted a wondering, admiring crowd of men, women, and children.
"Oh, where did you get these?" they cried. "How pretty they are - mighty
handsome - just too lovely for anything -where do they grow?" "On the
commonest trees about you," I replied. "You are now standing beside one of
them, and it is in full bloom; look up." And I pointed to a blossom-laden
Abies magnifica, about a hundred and twenty feet high, in front of the
house, used as a hitching post. And seeing its beauty for the first time,
their wonder could hardly have been greater or more sincere had their silver
fir hitching post blossomed for them at that moment as suddenly as Aaron's
rod. The mountain
hemlock extends an almost continuous belt along the Sierra and northern
ranges to Prince William's Sound, accompanied part of the way by the pines;
our two silver firs, to Mount Shasta, thence the fir belt is continued
through Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia by four other species,
Abies nobilis, grandis, amabilis, and lasiocarpa; while the magnificent
Sitka spruce, with large, bright, purple flowers, adorns the coast region
from California to Cook's Inlet and Kodiak. All these, interblending, form
one flowery belt - one garden blooming in June, rocking its myriad spires in
the hearty weather, bowing and swirling, enjoying clouds and the winds and
filling them with balsam; covering thousands of miles of the wildest
mountains, clothing the long slopes by the sea, crowning bluffs and
headlands and innumerable islands, and, fringing the banks of the glaciers,
one wild wavering belt of the noblest flowers in the world, worth a lifetime
of love work to know it. |