8 CALIFORNIA GARDEN FLOWERS. 



that there is still such a place. The whole argument of the Chicago 

 savant strongly affirms that there was and is a Garden of Eden and 

 that it was and is in California as our real estate literature clearly 

 contends. 



Obviously this Edenic discussion is intended for the purpose of 

 indicating the present relation of California to the other abodes of 

 mankind. The world at large developed California at the point where 

 the greatest ocean separates the east from the west. From California 

 the reversal of the westward course of empire the return-flow of 

 civilization must proceed. California first paid her debt to the world 

 in gold; since then California has rewarded the world's confidence by 

 producing a new type of mankind, a new point of view, a new phase 

 of literature, a new freedom of thought, a new conception of enterprise. 

 Incidentally California has also enriched the world with new plants, 

 new ways of growing and handling plants in industry, new installation 

 of plant-beauty in the heart and in the home. 



California's Natural Endowment. Having thus determined the 

 main fact of California's floral endowment from creation's dawn to the 

 present day, the writer must deny himself any attempt to picture that 

 endowment. Such effort belongs to our poets, painters and botanists, 

 and they have very successfully pursued it, for our California literature 

 and art-work with flowers is very creditable to a state so young in 

 history, though so old in beauty. But though the writer takes fright 

 at the standards of poetry and art, it is interesting to note briefly a 

 few California publications which treat of the arrangement, culture 

 and botany of the plants which this publication holds in view.* 



California's natural endowment of flowers seems to have amply 

 satisfied the aboriginal inhabitants, nor did their successors, the Span- 

 ish and the Mexicans, undertake much in garden-making. The padres 

 who established the 'Missions had ample fruit gardens, but they did 

 little with cultivated flowers probably because the wild flowers were 

 so varied and abundant. 



Enrichment of Our Flora. With the settlement after the gold dis- 

 covery in 1848, however, a new floral era dawned in California and 

 there was received from all parts of the world an endowment of skill 

 in floral arts and of floral sentiment. In the ranks of the pioneers 

 there came flower lovers and skilled culturists from all parts of the 

 United States and from the whole breadth of the old world from 



* "Gardening in California: Landscape and Flower," by John McLaren, San 

 Francisco; "Garden Book of California/' by Belle Sumner Angier, Los Angeles; 

 ' Gardening in California," by W. S. Lyon (out of print) ; "California Wild Flowers," 

 by Parsons and Buck, San Francisco; "A. Flora of California," "Flora of Western 

 Middle California," "Trees of California," and "Silva of California," by Dr. W. L. 

 Jepson, Berkeley; "A Yosemite Flora," and "Studies in Ornamental Trees and 

 Shrubs," by Dr. H. M. Hall, Berkeley; "The Golden Poppy," by Emory E. Smith, 

 San Francisco. These books, so far as now available, can be secured through the 

 Pacific Rural Press of San Francisco at publishers' prices. 



