MUS. COMP. ZOOL 
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Published monthly by The Agassiz Association, ArcAdiA: Sound Beach, Connecticut. 
Subscription. SI. 50 a year Single copy, 15 cents 
Entered as Second-Class Matter June 12. 1909. at Sound Beach Post Office, under Act of March 3, 1897. 
Acceptance for mailing at special rate of postage provided for in Section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, 
authorized on June 27 , 1918. 
Volume XIII. MAY, 1921 Number 12 
Spring in Southern California. 
By Mrs. Fannie E. Blakely, Botanist of ArcAdiA, Now Studying the Flora of 
Lower California. 
I shall always be glad to recall that 
I spent the date of this vernal equinox 
upon the Verdugo Hills. To ramble 
over their sunny slopes, bask in their 
tlowerv dingles and thread their glens 
fragrant with mountain lilac, is a new 
and delightful experience to one used 
to our slow coming New England 
springtimes. 
V inter on a mountain mesa in the 
shadow of this green range is thorough- 
ly enjoyable. There is such freedom in 
it, such bodily comfort, such variety. 
I have hut to step off my doorstone to 
be in the midst of the strange, desert 
wildness that has brooded here for 
hundreds of years. Save footpaths here 
and there leading from one to another 
of the small homesteads, there is noth- 
ing on many a square acre of this heath- 
er covered expanse that speaks of hu- 
man occupancy. I can nestle down 
amid the sage and greasewood and be as 
remote from human companionship as 
if I were the first inhabitant. The wind 
tosses and rustles the low evergreen 
vegetation with that peculiar sound 
that is the desert’s own voice heard for 
ages on the semiarid plateaus that 
circle the world. In all directions are 
flowers — lupines, blue as the sky or pur- 
ple as the cloud shadows on the hills ; 
wallflowers, yellow as daffodils; here 
and there a pentstemon, bright as 
flame — all set in a wide flung sprinkling 
of snowy nievita illumined with the 
covenas in violet blue, and the gilias 
in every shade of lilac and rose, and 
among them, covering the ground, a 
carpet of smaller blooms from the size 
of a pinhead to a thimble. 
I doubt not Connecticut will seem 
soberly dressed after this riot of color. 
The very soil here seems to glow with 
cinnabar and saffron tints, and the 
sun’s daily march through a cloudless 
sky, over a land of serrated peaks, pur- 
ple shadowed canyons and warm tinted 
vales, recalls one to a sense of strange- 
ness in New England’s soft and tender 
days. 
Life in my tiny bungalow is much 
like camping. It is pleasant to roam 
the mesa in the warm light of the de- 
scending sun and gather the next day’s 
kindling wood, snapping off the dry 
stems of the sage, resinous as pine and 
aromatic as mint. In the sharp, clear 
air of the mornings the breath of them 
ascends heavenward from my tiny 
Copyright 1921 by The Agassiz Association, ArcAdiA: Sound Beach, Conn. 
