RAILWAY GARDENING IN CALIFORNIA. 81 



this blue sky, among these wild hills, which, in their barrenness, seemed 

 to have dropped from the waterless regions of the moon. But do not let 

 me forget the colors of earth and rocks. These hills seem in the dis- 

 tance covered with a soft texture, as fine as and with the color of a 

 tiger's skin, with its dark dots where the yuccas grow, of a bunch of 

 greasewood here and there, or a bunch of low-spreading cacti. Here 

 and there a deep slash in the softness of the skin shows the underlying 

 red of the flesh fading into bluish gray. Great ragged cliffs of rusty red 

 sometimes break through the flower carpet of the desert's level, holding 

 on their crests fantastic ruins of ogre castles; and the yuccas hold up 

 their immense candlesticks pointed with the great, tapering candles of 

 their waxy bloom. Over it all the quivering, heated air of the desert, 

 and far to the west, against its heaven-girthed horizon, rise the islands 

 of the mirage sea, sending its phantom waves into the garden, lapping 

 inaudibly against these dreamland shores. The variety of bloom in the 

 Mojave Desert this year was indeed surprising to me. I should not 

 dare to give you names of any of them, here in these sacred halls of 

 science; but if my eyes did not deceive me in the swift passing of the 

 train through this garden, I saw considerable fine material for a Carl 

 Purdy, in the form of bulbous plants. 



Looking across this desert garden, with its refined harmony of colors, 

 its intense warmth, so free of all sensuousness, so exactly moderate in 

 its placing and spacing of plants and open soil, so devoid of the coarse 

 and the crowdedness of soils and plants which have water forever and 

 in overabundance, I felt how great and masterly were the soul and- the 

 hand of the gardener who planned and executed its existence. 



Stockton, Gal. 



