28 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



It is in the valleys and foothills that the typical California flora is 

 seen in its full glory. Here poppies and buttercups, creameups, tidy 

 tips, yellow pansies, sun cups, yellow forget-me-nots, berries and bush 

 mustard throw a gorgeous mozaic of mingled yellows over the coast 

 meadows. In the open foothills, fields covered with splendid splashes of 

 the wonderful gold of the poppy and the deep blue of the lupine, broken 

 in spots by the gray green of the oak, spread out like a huge impression- 

 istic canvas. On gentle slopes of sandy loam, escobita, cousin of the 

 gaudy Indian paint brush, stretches out into a velvety carpet of old 

 rose. 



Typical also of the California flowers are the many varieties of 

 bulbous plants curiously adapted to the California climate by their deep- 

 seated bulbs that lie dormant through the long dry season, sending up 

 their foliage leaves in early spring and their flower-stalks at the end of 

 the rainy season. In the open fields and country roadsides the mari- 

 posa tulips, coming after the showy spring annuals, display large open 

 cup-shaped flowers, delicately painted as a butterfly's wing. Brodiaeas, 

 some with open, others with close clusters of blue hyacinth-like flowers, 

 greet one everywhere. Mission bells, mysteriously invisible, stand soli- 

 tary tall and erect in the open woods, delighting their discoverer with 

 drooping bell-shaped flowers mottled with bronze and green. Fairy 

 lanterns, exquisite little plants of graceful form and delicate coloring, 

 grow half concealed among the grasses of the open woods and rock 

 ledges. 



The advent of the white man has greatly changed the aspect of the 

 vegetation in the valleys and foothills. Not only have vast fields of 

 showy annuals, chaparral and noble oaks given way to orchards, vine- 

 yards and grain fields, but many of the open, unfilled foothills are now 

 covered with wild oat, bur-clover or filaree, southern Europeans, brought 

 over by the Spanish padres and spread broadcast by nomadic bands of 

 sheep, which at the same time wiped out forever many a delicate native 

 annual. 



The Chaparral 



On dry gravelly hillsides, especially on southern exposures, and in 

 the valleys where the soil is light and the water-table below the reach 

 of roots, drought-resisting shrubs abound, forming dense, impenetrable 

 thickets known as chaparral. These shrubs are evergreens with short, 

 stiff, often spinescent branches and small, thick, leathery leaves of a 

 dull gray or olive green. The level mass takes on a somber monotonous 

 tone. But in blossom time, manzanitas with their tiny urn-shaped 

 flowers of a delicate pink, lilacs forming masses of bine, lavender or 

 white, garrya, with its long, pendant, soft gray catkins that have won 

 it the name of "silk-tassel tree," the ever-present chamise, a peculiar 

 rosaceous shrub with the foliage of the heath and spiraea-like clusters 



