WILD GARDENS OF THE YOSEMITE PARK 153 



est impulses, moving each division of the frond 

 separately at times as if fingering the music, 

 playing on invisible keys. 



Considering the lilies as you go up the moun- 

 tains, the first you come to is L. Pardalinum, 

 with large orange-yellow, purple-spotted flowers 

 bio; enoug-h for babies' bonnets. It is seldom 

 found higher than thirty-five hundred feet above 

 the sea, grows in magnificent groups of fifty to 

 a hundred or more, in romantic waterfall dells 

 in the pine woods shaded by overarching maple 

 and willow, alder and dogwood, with bushes in 

 front of the embowering trees for a border, and 

 ferns and sedges in front of the bushes ; while 

 the bed of black humus in which the bulbs 

 are set is carpeted with mosses and liverworts. 

 These richly furnished lily gardens are the pride 

 of the falls on the lower tributaries of the Tuol- 

 umne and Merced rivers, falls not like those of 

 Yosemite valleys, — coming from the sky with 

 rock-shaking thunder tones, — but small, with 

 low, kind voices cheerily singing in calm leafy 

 bowers, self-contained, keeping their snowy 

 skirts well about them, yet furnishing plenty 

 of spray for the lilies. 



The Washington lily [L. Washingtonianum) 

 is white, deliciously fragrant, moderate in size, 

 with three to ten flowered racemes. The largest 

 I ever measured was eight feet high, the raceme 

 two feet long, with fifty-two flowers, fifteen of 



