[Sidenote: =Redwood Rose=
_Ròsa gymnocàrpa_
=Pink
Spring, summer
Northwest=]
A charming kind, delicate both in foliage and flower, usually growing
in shady, mountain woods. The slender bush is from one to three
feet high, with dark brown stems, armed with some straight, slender
thorns, and light green leaves, usually with quite a number of neat
little leaflets, smooth and thin in texture. The flowers are an inch
or less across, usually single, with light yellow centers and bright
pink petals, very clean and fresh in tone, usually deeper towards the
margins. The sepals are not leafy at the tips, the flower-stalks, and
sometimes the leaf-stalks also, are covered with small, dark, sticky
hairs and the buds are tipped with carmine. Neither leaves nor flowers
are fragrant.
[Sidenote: =Mountain Misery=
_Chamaebàtia foliolòsa_
=White
Summer
California=]
This is the only kind. In open places, in the Sierra forests, the
ground is often carpeted for acres with the feathery foliage of this
charming shrub, sprinkled all over with pretty white flowers. Mountain
Misery does not at first seem an appropriate name for so attractive a
plant, but when we walk through the low, green thickets we find not
only that the tangled branches catch our feet but that the whole plant
is covered with a strong-smelling, resinous substance, which comes off
on our clothes in a most disagreeable manner. On a warm day the forest
is filled with the peculiar, medicinal fragrance and when, later in
the season, we unpack our camping outfit we are apt to be puzzled by
the smell of "Pond's Extract" which our clothes exhale. The shrub is
usually less than two feet high, with downy, evergreen foliage, the
numerous small leaflets so minutely subdivided and scalloped that
they have the appearance of soft ferns. The flowers resemble large
strawberry-blossoms, and have a top-shaped, five-lobed calyx, many
yellow stamens and one pistil, becoming a large, leathery akene. The
smell and foliage attract attention and the shrub has many names, such
as Bear-mat and Kittikit, or Kit-kit-dizze, so-called by the Indians.
Bears do not eat it, so the name Bear-clover is poor, and Tarweed
belongs to another plant. It is used medicinally.
[Illustration: Redwood Rose--Rosa gymnocarpa.