142 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



upper meadows there are miles of blue gentians 

 and daisies, white and blue violets ; and great 

 breadths of rosy purple heathworts covering 

 rocky moraines with a marvelous abundance of 

 bloom, enlivened by humming-birds, butterflies 

 and a host of other insects as beautiful as flow- 

 ers. In the lower and middle regions, also, many 

 of the most extensive beds of bloom are in great 

 part made by shrubs, — adenostoma, manzanita, 

 ceanothus, chamsebatia, cherry, rose, rubus, spi- 

 raea, shad, laurel, azalea, honeysuckle, calycan- 

 thus, ribes, philadelphus, and many others, the 

 sunny spaces about them bright and fragrant 

 with mints, lupines, geraniums, lilies, daisies, 

 goldenrods, castilleias, gilias, pentstemons, etc. 



Adenostoma fasciculatum is a handsome, 

 hardy, heathlike shrub belonging to the rose 

 family, flourishing on dry ground below the pine 

 belt, and often covering areas of twenty or thirty 

 square miles of rolling sun-beaten hills and dales 

 with a dense, dark green, almost impenetrable 

 chaparral, which in the distance looks like Scotch 

 heather. It is about six to eight feet high, has 

 slender elastic branches, red shreddy bark, needle- 

 shaped leaves, and small white flowers in panicles 

 about a foot long, making glorious sheets of fra- 

 grant bloom in the spring. To running fires it 

 offers no resistance, vanishing with the few 

 other flowery shrubs and vines and liliaceous 

 plants that grow with it about as fast as dry 



