104 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



Table of the Flowers), because of the exuberant 

 growth of poppies which covered it like a golden 

 table cloth, its folds dropping down into the valley. 

 Thence to the ocean is twenty-five miles in a bee- 

 line, and the story goes that that flowery flame could 

 be seen plainly in clear weather from vessels at sea 

 beating their way along the coast, and the captains 

 would set their course by it. I have never been 

 able to satisfy myself as to the truth of this pictur- 

 esque tradition there is no such great show of 

 poppies there now; but perhaps no one who has 

 once blinked his eyes in the glowing poppy fields of 

 a California spring will be rash enough to deny 

 the possibility of its correctness. It must more- 

 over be remembered that the ancient demesne of the 

 wild flowers was of far greater extent than the land 

 which is theirs to-day. Year by year more and 

 more of these Hesperian gardens of the wild are 

 being broken up by the encroaching settlements of 

 men; and only the other day I saw a plowman, 

 knee deep in eschscholtzias, driving his furrows 

 straight through five acres of them and quenching 

 their sheeted fire with the upturned earth. 



In view of the influence of this flower upon the 

 landscape it seems remarkable that no notice of its 

 existence occurs in the writings of the first ex- 

 plorers. As a matter of fact, not till nearly half a 



