CALIFORNIA PLANTS IN THEIR HOMES 



corn leaves, and give off moisture rapidly, and when the 

 soil gets dry they are sure to perish. It is not until after 

 they are dead, that the food they have stored will be used. 

 In June, perhaps, a tall flower stalk, sometimes six or 

 eight feet high, will shoot up from the bulb, and slender, 

 white lilies will open late in the afternoon, but we will 

 wait till June to see the rest. 



No. 3 is one of the earliest plants to bloom. It is 

 the cluster lily, cocometa, the Spanish call it. We shall 

 find out more about it in Chapter VII, but now is the time 

 to see what the first leaf does; it has pierced the ground by 

 means of its sharply pointed tip and it is wrapped about the 

 other leaves and the oeginnings of the flowers, so that it 

 brings them, too, above ground and protects them for a 

 time. No. 2 is a young plant of the blue-eyed grass. 

 No. i belongs to the carrot family, and will bloom 

 early. You will find that many other plants that were en- 

 tirely underground during the dry season, are starting into 

 life again now. The prettiest of them all are the ferns, but 

 they shall have a chapter to themselves. 



A very striking new growth from an underground 

 store-house is the chilicothe, or wild cucumber. The 

 shoots come up early in the winter and in a very short time 

 they are many feet long and are in full flower. In the val- 

 leys of Southern California one can always find the chili- 

 cothe in flower before Christmas, even in dry years when 

 there is very little other new growth at that time. The 

 root explains this, in fact the plant is often called big-root 

 or man-root; roots two feet long and half as thick are com- 

 mon, and they are said to be sometimes four feet long. 

 These roots must store up a great deal of moisture as well 

 as food, for when the regular season for new growth comes, 

 they can supply the shoots regardless of rainfall; in fact, 

 new shoots will come out in November from roots that 

 have been out of the soil for months. Of course such roots 



