90 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



ing suns of late January, to start on again to its 

 crowning in April. That, however, is too revolu- 

 tionary a way of putting it for most people, whose 

 conventions require a bit of winter in their year, 

 and for them spring waits for the pushing up of 

 the daffodil leaves through the garden's tender 

 mold. This cheerful happening may be as early 

 as mid- January, or rarely as late as March ; usually 

 it occurs in early February. The principal deter- 

 mining factor is the rainfall. If this sets in lib- 

 erally about November, as it may be counted upon 

 to do in seven seasons out of ten, and is repeated at 

 intervals of two or three weeks during December 

 and January, the wild flower hunter will be war- 

 ranted on any February morning, in taking his vas- 

 culum and a bite of luncheon, and making for the 

 foothills. 



The First Wild Flowers 



California geography is replete with Spanish 

 terms descriptive of various features of the land- 

 scape. One of these is mesa, which means literally 

 a table, and is applied to the sloping or at times 

 level benches of land that extend outward from the 

 bases of the hills, and finally break off more or less 

 abruptly into the valleys. On such mesas lying to 

 the sun, and in the traversing washes and canons 



