40 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



MOUNTAIN MISERY. 



By Willis Linn Jepson. 



The most abundant, widespread, and exclusive undershrub 

 in the lower yellow-pine belt and upper portion of the black- 

 oak belt in the Sierra Nevada is a plant called by the moun- 

 taineers mountain misery and by botanists Chamcebatia folio- 

 losa. It grows about one foot high, has fine fern-like foliage, 

 flowers like those of a strawberry and an odor recalling tar or 

 tarweeds. It favors open forest or broad "opens" in the forest, 

 usually grows by itself exclusive of other species and covers 

 mountain ridges and slopes for stretches of many miles with 

 an almost unbroken cover. It is not pleasant to walk through ; 

 its heavy, rather rank, odor, is disagreeable ; no animal will eat 

 it, and run-away animals leave no trail in it for their owner to 

 follow. Tar-bush, Bear-clover, Bear-mat ,Bear-weed, and Jeru- 

 salem Oak are other folk-names for it, all significant of its 

 varied characteristics; but none of these spring so completely 

 out of the soil as Mountain Misery, a name redolent of its un- 

 pleasant odor, its wearisome monotony, and its lack of use to 

 the mountaineer, in spite of its thriftiness and abundance. 



On the other hand, the botanist finds it a rather interesting 

 plant. He calls it Chamcebatia foliolosa; Chamcebatia means 

 ground bramble and directly hints of its family relationship 

 to blackberries and the like, foliolosa meanwhile referring to its 

 numerous small leaflets (Fig. i). On account of its abundance 

 and the limited range of conditions under which it grows, it is 

 one of the plants indicative of the lower Transition Zone in the 

 Sierra Nevada. Areas of it beneath very open Black Oak groves 

 sometimes present at a little distance the aspect of a close, 

 well-kept lawn, as beautiful slopes, indeed, as one would wish 

 to see. Its dark-green, lace-like foliage is rather attractive 

 against its almost black bark ; a bank of it in full flower beneath 

 the trunks of Yellow Pines is a pleasant sight to Sierrans with 



