26 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 



first to attract our attention was a small tree of Santa 

 Catalina Island which we noticed in Januar3' covered with 

 a profusion of white blossoms. At the same time it was 

 fruiting, and its bunched carpels numbering from three to 

 six or eight or more and resembling the fruit of small 

 peonies, betra3'ed its family position. It proved to be 

 Crossosoma Cnlifornicum, a woody cousin of our eastern 

 buttercups and anemones. In the canons of the San 

 Jacinto Mountains we found in March another species ot 

 the same ranunculaceous shrub, C. Bigelovii, with smaller 

 purplish blossoms and purplish fiaiit. 



The little New^ Jersey Tea of the east that hugs the 

 ground by the wood's edge, is represented in California by 

 dozens of species, many of which are shrubs as high as a 

 man's head and several are even arboreal in their propor- 

 tions. The poppy family which is associated in eastern 

 minds with its herbaceous members, the garden poppy, 

 the celandine and the bloodroot, developes in California a 

 stout shrubby genus — the tree-poppj- {Dendronecon rig- 

 ida) whose compact bushes, sometimes six or eight feet 

 high, and starred over with large golden flowers, are con- 

 spicuous sights on the hillsides of their choice. The heath 

 tribe w^hich in the Middle and New England States are a 

 lowly race, or at most, as in the rhododendrons, shrubby 

 growths, include trees on the Pacific Slope — such as the 

 exquisite madrons which Bret Hartc has enshrined in 

 wortln- verse, and at least one species of the manzanita, 

 own cousin to the creeping bearberries of the New Jersey 

 Pine Barrens and the alpine tops of northern mountains. 



Another of these arboreal daughters of Hesperus, for 

 which our eastern education had not prepared us, was the 

 elder. The Southern California species is Sambucus 

 glauca — so named probabh' from the frosty bloom on its 

 dark blue fruit — and although it is frequently only a large 

 shrub, it is quite as often a strikingh' beautiful tree, as- 

 suming man}' varied and picturesque attitudes of growth, 

 so that a grove of it reminds one of an old apple orchard. 

 The monkey flower, too, had a surprise for us, in a shrub- 



