FLORAL LITERATURE OF CALIFORNIA. 37 



1860, when Dr. Andrew Murray published his two parts of "Notes on 

 California Trees/' compiled chiefly from the letters of his brother, Wm. 

 Murray, of San Francisco, and illustrated with superb lithographs of 

 the Sequoias. It was in 1860, too, that Thomas Starr King wrote (I 

 think in the Atlantic Monthly) a very charming account of a trip 

 "around the bay in the season of flowers," when, as he expressed it, 

 there were "flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile." 



Here we begin to reach the modern way of looking at things. All 

 through the pages of the publications of the State Agricultural Soci- 

 ety between 1856 and 1860, the early reports of the State Surveyor- 

 General, the "State Kegister" for 1857-60, the rambling surveys of 

 Dr. Trask, the first state geologist, we have had somewhat obscure 

 glimpses of a land overflowing with growth and blossom. We have 

 seen the pioneer surveyors, Day and Goddard and the rest, camping in 

 the lily beds of the high Sierra valleys; we have watched pioneer com- 

 mittees going around, away back in the early fifties, to tell us, all too 

 briefly, of the glories of Shell Mound Nurseries, the New England 

 Gardens, Hock Farm, Fontainebleau, and other places now, alas ! in ruins. 

 We hear of Fox, Sonntag, Prevost, Macondray, Lewelling. These 

 reports, though hardly the literature of the garden, are very excellent 

 materials, out of which, some of these days, the right man or woman 

 will reconstruct the whole story, and give us our long-needed book on 

 "California Floriculture." 



That "modern note" in our garden literature to which I have alluded 

 as characteristic of the glowing essays of Thomas Starr King was also 

 manifest in some California writings of Dr. Bushnell. Then it found 

 fuller expression in the pages of the Overland Monthly, where Muir, the 

 Le Contes, Avery, Williams, Miss Coolbrith, Bartlett, and Sill, and a 

 little later some of Professor Sill's pupils, made for a few years a very 

 striking presentation of the life, color, strength, and beauty of out- 

 door California. A good deal of the best writing of this period between 

 1868 and 1875 appeared in the Bulletin, Argonaut, California Horti- 

 culturist, and Rural Press. It is notable historically, because it covers 

 the whole field. Nothing that is now being written about gardens and 

 flowers is in its way any better than some of the work, signed and 

 unsigned, which appeared in the Overland Monthly, and in other San 

 Francisco publications, in the days before the gaudy splendors of the 

 sensational Sunday newspapers. 



In the way of distinctive floral publications we have had. two of 

 importance. The first, the California Horticulturist, founded by F. A. 

 Miller in 1870, lasted ten years. One of its most interesting editors 

 was the late E. J. Hooper, one of the owners of the Western Farmer and 

 Gardener, established by him in Cincinnati in 1839 or 1840. Plates of 



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