IN CALIFORNIA 117 



sheets of lavender and pentstemons of several 

 species, one that nearly every one knows bearing 

 panicles a foot or two long of vivid scarlet trumpet- 

 shaped flowers, which have suggested the popular 

 name, scarlet bugler. This is Penstemon centran- 

 fhifolius, and its colonies brighten the chaparral 

 sometimes by the acre. The bees have no monopoly 

 of its sweets, for upon it the hummers levy special 

 tribute a fact that has given rise to another pretty 

 name, humming-bird's dinner-horn. No less con- 

 spicuous in their way are the mimuluses 6 or mon- 

 key flowers, their yellow or salmon-colored blossoms 

 set thick upon the little bushes somewhat suggesting 

 azaleas. 



Certain of the chaparral plants are peculiar in 

 withholding their bloom until after months of 

 drought. Then, one day, after such a drying out 

 as would have mummified an ordinary plant, the 

 flowers spread their exquisite corollas to the air and 

 light. Such is a Pacific Coast relative of the gar- 

 den's bleeding-heart the golden dicentra, which I 

 have collected in the breathless heat of many a mid- 

 July noon; and a larkspur (Delphinium cardinale), 



e Cousins of the old-fashioned musk plant of our grandmothers' 

 window boxes, which is a California wild flower growing by moun- 

 tain brooks Mimulus moschatus, an introduction of Douglas's. His 

 original collection of it, however, was in Oregon in 1826. Many other 

 California species have long been prized in the gardens of Europe. 



