The Wild Gardens of the Yosemite Park
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 soilbeds there are many others comparatively small,
reformation 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 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 cañons 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.
[Illustration: A Yosemite Cañon Cliff (El Capitan).]
Even the majestic cañon 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 humming-birds, 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, chamæbatia, cherry, rose,
rubus, spiræa, shad, laurel, azalea, honeysuckle, calycanthus, ribes,
philadelphus, 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
Chamæbatia 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 thricepinnate 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
mantle 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 (_Arctostaphylos_). Though one species,
the Uva-ursa, or bearberry,—the kinikinic of the Western
Indians,—extends around the world, the greater part of them are
California. 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 cañons choked with earthquake boulders; for
they make the most uncompromisingly stubborn of all chaparral. Even
bears take pains to go around the stoutest patches of 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 cañon cliffs, some of the tallest specimens have
well-defined trunks six inches of 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, prostatus 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 cañons, 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.
[Illustration: California Azaleas.]
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 suffruticosa, 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 downpressed
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,
pellæa, cheilanthes, polypodium, adiantum, 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 vaselike
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 cañons 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, Asplenium filix-fœmina 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
interblending. 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 pellæa in the Park, the handsome andromedæfolia,
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 Cryptogramme
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 round 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 hillsides
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 cañons, 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 likely 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
habenaria 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. cæruleus 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 Calochortus, Brodiæa 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, chloragalum, 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 sanguinea_). 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.
[Illustration: Mariposa Tulips and the Snow Plant.]
Down in the main cañons adjoining the azalea and rose gardens there are
fine beds of herbaceous plants,—tall mints and sunflowers, iris,
œnothera, brodiæa, and bright beds of erythræa 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, chænactis,
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
cañon 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, erythræa, pink and scarlet mimulus, hosackia, saxifrage,
sunflowers and daisies, with azalea, spiræa, 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 penstemon, 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 cañons, 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 cañon bottoms between lake basins, where
the streams flow fast over glacier-polished granite, there are rows of
pothole gardens full of ferns, daisies, golden-rods, 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 cañons 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 cañons
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
11,500 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 centre 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 impresssive 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 flower 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
butter-cups, 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 mountain-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 (douglasii and cæspitosum),
and the red-flowered silene, with innumerable flowers hiding the
leaves. Though herbaceous plants, like the trees and shrubs, are
dwarfed as they ascend, two of these mountain dwellers, Hulsea algida
and Polemonium confertum, 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 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 œnothera 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 bloom-time 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 fires 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!
[Illustration: Alpine Phlox and _Polemonium confertum_.]
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
broad. 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.