110 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



post and cottage porch, it is you for the mustang 

 and the chaparral trail. 



Now there is chaparral and there is chamisal, 

 and to the undiscriminating American sons and 

 daughters of the Golden West, they are the same 

 thing what the Easterner calls brush or scrub, or 

 in more stately English, a thicket. To the Spanish- 

 Calif ornian, however, there is a difference. Chami- 

 sal is a thick stand of chamiso, the name which the 

 Spanish apply to the shrubby evergreen greasewood 

 that covers mile after mile of mountain slopes 

 throughout California, particularly in the south, the 

 Adenostoma of botanists. Chaparral is strictly a 

 dense growth of more or less thorny shrubs and 

 small trees of various sorts in which the chaparro, 

 or scrub live-oak, predominates; and because a 

 rider on horseback will get his clothing cut to shreds 

 by going through it at a rapid gait, he envelopes 

 his legs in chaparrajos or chaparreros, the real 

 name of the leather overalls that cowboys and nov- 

 elists have made over into "shaps." Quite as 

 often as not Nature mixes up the two sorts of 

 thicket, and in our discussion of them, they need not 

 be kept separate. 



In many places much of this chaparral growth 

 will be found to be made up of ceanothus, popu- 

 larly known as California lilac or myrtle. There 



