The Flowers
Yosemite was all one glorious flower garden before plows and scythes
and trampling, biting horses came to make its wide open spaces look
like farmers’ pasture fields. Nevertheless, countless flowers still
bloom every year in glorious profusion on the grand talus slopes, wall
benches and tablets, and in all the fine, cool side-cañons up to the
rim of the Valley, and beyond, higher and higher, to the summits of the
peaks. Even on the open floor and in easily-reached side-nooks many
common flowering plants have survived and still make a brave show in
the spring and early summer. Among these we may mention tall œnotheras,
_Pentstemon lutea_, and _P. Douglasii_ with fine blue and red flowers;
Spraguea, scarlet zauschneria, with its curious radiant rosettes
characteristic of the sandy flats; mimulus, eunanus, blue and white
violets, geranium, columbine, erythraea, larkspur, collomia, draperia,
gilias, heleniums, bahia, goldenrods, daisies, honeysuckle; heuchera,
bolandra, saxifrages, gentians; in cool cañon nooks and on Clouds’ Rest
and the base of Starr King Dome you may find _Primula suffrutescens_,
the only wild primrose discovered in California, and the only known
shrubby species in the genus. And there are several fine orchids,
habenaria, and cypripedium, the latter very rare, once common in the
Valley near the foot of Glacier Point, and in a bog on the rim of the
Valley near a place called Gentry’s Station, now abandoned. It is a
very beautiful species, the large oval lip white, delicately veined
with purple; the other petals and the sepals purple, strap-shaped, and
elegantly curled and twisted.
Of the lily family, fritillaria, smilacina, chlorogalum and several
fine species of brodiæa, Ithuriel’s spear, and others less prized are
common, and the favorite calochortus, or Mariposa lily, a unique genus
of many species, something like the tulips of Europe but far finer.
Most of them grow on the warm foothills below the Valley, but two
charming species, _C. cœruleus_ and _C. nudus_, dwell in springy places
on the Wawona road a few miles beyond the brink of the walls.
The snow plant (_Sarcodes sanguinea_) is more admired by tourists than
any other in California. It is red, fleshy and watery and looks like a
gigantic asparagus shoot. Soon after the snow is off the round it rises
through the dead needles and humus in the pine and fir woods like a
bright glowing pillar of fire. In a week or so it grows to a height of
eight or twelve inches with a diameter of an inch and a half or two
inches; then its long fringed bracts curl aside, allowing the twenty-
or thirty-five-lobed, bell-shaped flowers to open and look straight out
from the 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 fiery red. Its color could appeal to one’s blood.
Nevertheless, it is a singularly cold and unsympathetic plant.
Everybody admires it as a wonderful curiosity, but nobody loves it as
lilies, violets, roses, daisies are loved. Without fragrance, it stands
beneath the pines and firs lonely and silent, as if unacquainted with
any other plant in the world; never moving in the wildest storms; rigid
as if lifeless, though covered with beautiful rosy flowers.
Far the most delightful and fragrant of the Valley flowers is the
Washington lily, white, moderate in size, with from three- to
ten-flowered racemes. I found one specimen in the lower end of the
Valley at the foot of the Wawona grade that 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 meadow-garden companies like the large and the small tiger lilies
(_pardalinum_ and _parvum_), 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. It is now becoming scarce in the most
accessible parts of its range on account of the high price paid for its
bulbs by gardeners through whom it has been distributed far and wide
over the flower-loving world. For, on account of its pure color and
delicate, delightful fragrance, all lily lovers at once adopted it as a
favorite.
The principal shrubs are manzanita and ceanothus, several species of
each, azalea, _Rubus nutkanus_, brier rose, choke-cherry philadelphus,
calycanthus, garrya, rhamnus, etc.
The manzanita never fails to attract particular attention. The species
common in the Valley is usually about six or seven feet high,
round-headed with innumerable branches, red or chocolate-color bark,
pale green leaves set on edge, and a rich profusion of small, pink,
narrow-throated, urn-shaped flowers, like those of arbutus. The knotty,
crooked, angular branches are about as rigid as bones, and the red bark
is so thin and smooth on both trunk and branches, they look as if they
had been peeled and polished and painted. In the spring large areas on
the mountain up to a height of eight or nine thousand feet are
brightened with the rosy flowers, and in autumn with their red fruit.
The pleasantly acid berries, about the size of peas, look like little
apples, and a 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 weeks and months. The
different species of ceanothus usually associated with manzanita are
flowery fragrant and altogether delightful shrubs, growing in glorious
abundance, not only in the Valley, but high up in the forest on sunny
or half-shaded ground. In the sugar-pine woods the most beautiful
species is _C. integerrimus_, often called Californian lilac, or deer
brush. It is five or six feet high with slender branches, glossy
foliage, and abundance of blue flowers in close, showy panicles. Two
species, _C. prostrates_ and _C. procumbens_, spread smooth,
blue-flowered mats and rugs beneath the pines, and offer fine beds to
tired mountaineers. The commonest species, _C. cordulatus_, is most
common in the silver-fir woods. It is white-flowered and thorny, and
makes dense thickets of tangled chaparral, difficult to wade through or
to walk over. But it is pressed flat every winter by ten or fifteen
feet of snow. The western azalea makes glorious beds of bloom along the
river bank and meadows. In the Valley it is from two to five feet high,
has fine green leaves, mostly hidden beneath its rich profusion of
large, fragrant white and yellow flowers, which are in their prime in
June, July and August, according to the elevation, ranging from 3000 to
6000 feet. Near the azalea-bordered streams the small wild rose,
resembling _R. blanda_, makes large thickets deliciously fragrant,
especially on a dewy morning and after showers. Not far from these
azalea and rose gardens, _Rubus nutkanus_ covers the ground with broad,
soft, velvety leaves, and pure-white flowers as large as those of its
neighbor and relative, the rose, and much finer in texture, followed at
the end of summer by soft red berries good for everybody. This is the
commonest and the most beautiful of the whole blessed, flowery, fruity
Rubus genus.
There are a great many interesting ferns in the Valley and about it.
Naturally enough the greater number are rock ferns—pellæa, cheilanthes,
polypodium, adiantum, woodsia, cryptogramma, etc., with small tufted
fronds, lining cool glens and fringing the seams of the cliffs. The
most important of the larger species are woodwardia, aspidium,
asplenium, and, above all, the common pteris. _Woodwardia radicans_ is
a superb, broad-shouldered fern five to eight feet high, growing in
vase-shaped clumps where tile ground is nearly level and on some of the
benches of the north wall of the Valley where it is watered by a broad
trickling stream. It thatches the sloping rocks, frond overlapping
frond like roof shingles. The broad-fronded, hardy _Pteris aquilina_,
the commonest of ferns, covers large areas on the floor of the Valley.
No other fern does so much for the color glory of autumn, with its
browns and reds and yellows, even after lying dead beneath the snow all
winter. It spreads a rich brown mantle over the desolate ground in the
spring before the grass has sprouted, and at the first touch of
sun-heat its young fronds come rearing up full of faith and hope
through the midst of the last year’s ruins.
Of the five species of pellæa, _P. Breweri_ is the hardiest as to
enduring high altitudes and stormy weather and at the same time it is
the most fragile of the genus. It grows in dense tufts in the clefts of
storm-beaten rocks, high up on the mountain-side on the very edge of
the fern line. It is a handsome little fern about four or five inches
high, has pale-green pinnate fronds, and shining bronze-colored stalks
about as brittle as glass. Its companions on the lower part of its
range are _Cryptogramma acrostichoides_ and _Phegopteris alpestris_,
the latter with soft, delicate fronds, not in the least like those of
Rock fern, though it grows on the rocks where the snow lies longest.
_Pellaea 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, wet or dry, and around the edges of boulders that
are resting on glacier pavements with no fissures whatever. About a
thousand feet lower we find the smaller, more abundant _P. densa_ on
ledges and boulder-strewn, fissured pavements, watered until late in
summer from oozing currents, derived from lingering snowbanks. It is,
or rather was, extremely abundant between the foot of the Nevada and
the head of the Vernal Fall, but visitors with great industry have dug
out almost every root, so that now one has to scramble in
out-of-the-way places to find it. The three species of Cheilanthes in
the Valley—_C. californica_, _C. gracillima_, and _myriophylla_, with
beautiful two-to-four-pinnate fronds, an inch to five inches long,
adorn the stupendous walls however dry and sheer. The exceedingly
delicate californica is so rare that I have found it only once. The
others are abundant and are sometimes accompanied by the little gold
fern, _Gymnogramme triangularis_, and rarely by the curious little
_Botrychium simplex_, some of them less than an inch high. The finest
of all the rock ferns is _Adiantum pedatum_, lover of waterfalls and
the finest spray-dust. The homes it loves best are over-leaning,
cave-like hollows, beside the larger falls, where it can wet its
fingers with their dewy spray. Many of these moss-lined chambers
contain thousands of these delightful ferns, clinging to mossy walls by
the slightest hold, reaching out their delicate finger-fronds on dark,
shining stalks, sensitive and tremulous, throbbing in unison with every
movement and tone of the falling water, moving each division of the
frond separately at times, as if fingering the music.
May and June are the main bloom-months of the year. Both the flowers
and falls are then at their best. By the first of August the midsummer
glories of the Valley are past their prime. The young birds are then
out of their nests. Most of the plants have gone to seed; berries are
ripe; autumn tints begin to kindle and burn over meadow and grove, and
a soft mellow haze in the morning sunbeams heralds the approach of
Indian summer. The shallow river is now at rest, its flood-work done.
It is now but little more than a series of pools united by trickling,
whispering currents that steal softly over brown pebbles and sand with
scarce an audible murmur. Each pool has a character of its own and,
though they are nearly currentless, the night air and tree shadows keep
them cool. Their shores curve in and out in bay and promontory, giving
the appearance of miniature lakes, their banks in most places embossed
with brier and azalea, sedge and grass and fern; and above these in
their glory of autumn colors a mingled growth of alder, willow, dogwood
and balm-of-Gilead; mellow sunshine overhead, cool shadows beneath;
light filtered and strained in passing through the ripe leaves like
that which passes through colored windows. The surface of the water is
stirred, perhaps, by whirling water-beetles, or some startled trout,
seeking shelter beneath fallen logs or roots. The falls, too, are
quiet; no wind stirs, and the whole Valley floor is a mosaic of greens
and purples, yellows and reds. Even the rocks seem strangely soft and
mellow, as if they, too, had ripened.