BOTANY. s 233 
root of indefinite length ; but often poor and puny is the top, that 
creeps not far from the crown, with perhaps few flowers and little 
fruit. But mulch a moist, black, brackish, cracky soil, with only 
six or eight inches of sand, and it will go down to, or a little into it, 
spreading abroad its forked subdivisions and fibres, almost or quite 
horizontally ; the crown-sprouts now run riotously, mantling the 
sand with vines, full of pink flowers in fruitful umbels unnumbered. 
Often one spray of water above will kill it entirely; or, the root 
remaining, it will sometimes come up and flourish again if surface 
irrigation is neglected, even two years afterwards. A similar short 
horizontal spread of root is seen with Alfalfa, on tule or lands fairly 
shaking and rocking with a peaty carpet; and so of a thousand 
roots, otherwise exceedingly deep, and prone to delve. The legiti- 
mate practical inferences we leave to the good sense of every 
enlightened stock-raiser, farmer and cultivator. 
Florists are apt to -complain that many of our bulbs ere they 
bloom lose one essential beauty of plants, namely, their radicle 
leaves, which, they say, “dry up, and leave the stems looking 
naked and bare. They are frequently found upon exposed hills 
.and slopes, rocks, etc., descending down dry and very hot valleys, 
into debris and alluvial bottoms, where sand or loam with under- 
ground moisture abounds. The very same plants are seen to rejoice 
best where they find some shade and shelter; otherwise, they be- 
speak a struggle for existence, i. e., their leaves prematurely or 
naturally dry up early to.save exhaustion. In half shades, along 
igh banks and slopes, contiguous to creeks, with adequate subsoil 
moisture, we see Cyclobothra alba, with long and beautiful glaucous 
leaves, say an inch and a half wide and eighteen inches to two feet 
in length, accompanying the flowers, ten to twenty in number ; the 
i golden C. pulchella and most others tolerate more sun and drought, 
with their companions the manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca); oaks, 
etc., near whose shades it is wont to linger ; but its best forms love 
rich, rocky, half shady drains — leaf and flower companions to the 
close. Witness Seubertia laxa, two to four feet high; the same 
: Dichelostemas and Brodicas, with ten to fifty flowers, and green 
- leaves in similar grace and completeness of beauty. The list might 
~ be extended beyond the reader’s patience; what we desire to say 
and impress is, that the same plants exposed are barely one 
quarter as large, and with no green leaves at all, or at best a poor 
apology for them; and so of numberless others. 
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