78 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



wilderness of peak and glacier. The horses were 

 brought forth, and we strung out in single file for 

 War Creek Pass. 



The trail for several miles leads sharply upward 

 through the peculiar Cascade forest peculiar, to an 

 Easterner, because it is at once meadow, garden, forest, 

 and rock precipice. The trees, for the most part great 

 upstanding Douglas firs, with a considerable admixture 

 of cedar and some hardwoods, on this side of the range 

 do not grow thickly together like a stand of eastern pine 

 or hemlock. The forest energy seems to have con- 

 centrated into single specimens often a hundred feet 

 apart, which rear brown trunks for fifty or seventy-five 

 feet without a limb. In our eastern woods a tree so 

 isolated would throw lateral branches, and we develop 

 no such shaggy columnar trunks rising from steep 

 lawns of grass, their feet set firm in beds of wild flowers. 

 Almost the first garden we came upon, close to the 

 water's edge, was a great bed of foxgloves on either 

 side of a tiny brook. Every year in my garden I sow 

 these queenly biennials, transplanting and retransplant- 

 ing the young plants, nursing them tenderly through the 

 Winter, and deploring their later tendency to throw back 

 to magenta. Yet, in this wild garden beside the ice- 

 water brook, self-sown and self-protected, the gorgeous 

 spikes were growing almost six feet tall, and not a 

 magenta one in the lot! Most of them were white, 

 flecked with pink. Their stalks were thick and strong. 



