USEFUL WILD PLANTS 



wounds, hundreds in number, the sap later on will 

 drop pattering to the ground; and I have stepped 

 from bright sunshine on a March day into the shadow 

 of one of these trees and been sprinkled by tlie 

 descending spray as by a shower of rain. 



On re-reading this chapter I see I have overlooked 

 two common wild plants whose possibilities for tea 

 making are worth the camper's knowing. One is 

 that charming little creeping vine with evergreen 

 thyme-like leaves exhaling the fragrance of winter- 

 green, Chiogenes liispidula, T. and G., the Creeping 

 Snowberry, which delights in cool upland bogs of 

 the northern Atlantic seaboard. The tiny white 

 flowers, solitary in the axils of the leaves, are less 

 showy than the white berries which give the plant 

 its name. Readers of Thoreau will recall his brew- 

 ing his best tea of it in the Maine woods. The other 

 plant is a familiar Pacific Coast fern, Pellaea 

 ornitliopus, Hook., the Bird's-foot ClitT-brake, found 

 in dry ground nearly throughouit California, and 

 easily identified by the division of the fronds into a 

 series of stiff triple-pointed segments strikingly like 

 the three spreading toes of a bird's foot. Tea made 

 by steeping the dried fronds is both tasty and 

 fragrant. 



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