234 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



f ornia grapes and soon supplemented the old Mission 

 stock by importations of other varieties of Vitis 

 vinifera from France. The scions were shipped 

 from France to Boston, I am told, and thence around 

 the Horn in sailing vessels hide droghers, doubt- 

 less, such as Dana tells about in his ' Two Years Be- 

 fore the Mast,' which traded up and down the Coast 

 in those days. Vignes was a popular citizen in his 

 time and lived in a house near the Los Angeles River 

 with a fine old sycamore tree before it, of which he 

 bragged as much as he did of his grape vines. The 

 Spanish-America*! word for sycamore is aliso, and 

 so he was nicknamed Don Luis del Aliso. The tree 

 is long since swallowed up in the growth of the city, 

 but its memory is preserved in the name of an im- 

 portant business thoroughfare, Aliso Street. Vig- 

 nes believed in oranges, too, but the man who gave 

 the first impetus to orange culture in California was 

 a Kentuckian named William Wolf skill, who landed 

 in Los Angeles about the same time as Vignes. He 

 was a trapper and had come across the deserts, ar- 

 riving in the City of the Angels dead-broke. Try- 

 ing to raise money to get away, he finally realized 

 California was a good enough place to stay in, and 

 turned his attention to horticulture, particularly 

 oranges, starting in where the Padres left off. He 

 originated a budded seedling that was as famous in 



