IN CALIFORNIA 155 



Everywhere, nestling at the redwoods' feet, are 

 clumps of the graceful Polystichum munitum, or 

 swordfern, which tourists often mistake for its east- 

 ern cousin the Christmas fern; while over all is the 

 hush of the forest, broken only by the twitter of 

 birds and the tapping of the wood-pecker the car- 

 penter, the Spanish call him boring holes in the 

 tree-trunks to store acorns in, which it is an even 

 chance the rascally squirrels will steal. Douglas, 

 in his reports, speaks enthusiastically of the red- 

 wood as the especial beauty of California vegetation, 

 giving "the mountains a most peculiar I was go- 

 ing to say, awful appearance; something that 

 plainly tells us that we are not in Europe." 



It was Sequoia sempervirens that attracted the 

 notice of the first Spanish expedition by land in 

 California, as has been told in another chapter, when 

 in 1769 the explorers were in search of the harbor of 

 Monterey; but the first trained botanical observer 

 to detect the tree and note its features in a scien- 

 tific way, was Thaddeus Haenke, with Malaspina's 

 ships when they touched at Monterey in 1791. A 

 year later Menzies collected specimens of it at Santa 

 Cruz, and it was from these that the English botan- 

 ist Lambert gave to the world in 1828 the first tech- 

 nical description of the tree. He believed it to be 

 a Taxodium or cypress a genus to which the bald 



