274 WITH THE FLOWERS AND TREES 



disappointment as an article of diet, for they are 

 rather dry and chaffy, though edible, and the early 

 birds usually consume them before a man gets out 

 in his garden of a morning. The white flowers, in 

 shape like tiny urns, are very pretty in the eyes of 

 every one who appreciates the day of floral small 

 things. 



After all is said, however, it is the spring that 

 brings to California as elsewhere the culmination 

 of garden bloom. This may be as early as March, 

 but usually the crest of this wonderful floral wave 

 breaks on the Coast in April. Then come the per- 

 fect days of the year. The heavy rains are over; 

 the lengthening days are filled with sunshine, some- 

 times after a night of showers or of drenching fog 

 that makes the face of the garden glisten like the 

 wet face of love. Then the air is sweet with 

 fragrance of orange blossoms and freesias and 

 bursting honeysuckle, musical with songs of mead- 

 ow-larks and mockers and the ubiquitous but un- 

 friended linnets. Miles of Cherokee roses, white 

 and pink in hedge-rows, line country roads and di- 

 vide town lots like snow banks; wistarias equally 

 prodigal of blossom here white, there lavender 

 mass themselves over arbors, festoon themselves 

 along fences and clamber far up into tree tops to be 

 caught there in mid-air in arrested cascades. Jas- 



