WILD GARDENS OF THE YOSEMITE PARK 113 



grass, leaving nothing but ashes. But with 

 wonderful vigor it rises again and again in fresh 

 beauty from the root, and calls back to its hos- 

 pitable mansions the multitude of wild animals 

 that had to flee for their lives. 



As soon as you enter the pine woods you 

 meet the charming little Chamaebatia foliolosa, 

 one of the handsomest of the Park shrubs, next 

 in fineness and beauty to the heathworts of the 

 alpine regions. Like adenostoma it belongs to 

 the rose family, is from twelve to eighteen inches 

 high, has brown bark, slender branches, white 

 flowers like those of the strawberry, and thrice- 

 pinnate glandular, yellow-green leaves, finely 

 cut and fernlike, as if unusual pains had been 

 taken in fashioning them. Where there is 

 plenty of sunshine at an elevation of three thou- 

 sand to six thousand feet, it makes a close, con- 

 tinuous growth, leaf touching leaf over hundreds 

 of acres, spreading a handsome mantle beneath 

 the yellow and sugar pines. Here and there a lily 

 rises above it, an arching bunch of tall bromus, 

 and at wide intervals a rosebush or clump of 

 ceanothus or manzanita, but there are no rough 

 weeds mixed with it, — no roughness of any 

 sort. 



Perhaps the most widely distributed of all the 

 Park shrubs and of the Sierra in general, cer- 

 tainly the most strikingly characteristic, are the 

 many species of manzanita (Arctostaphylos). 



