umpet-shaped flowers, others with broad
flaring mouths; some of them tall herbs, and others large
shrubs, with varying shades of dark red, light red, orange,
cream-color, and yellow, spangle hill-side, rock-pile, and
ravine. Among them the morning-glory twines with flowers of
purest white, new lupins climb over the old ones, and the
trailing vetch festoons rock and shrub and tree with long
garlands of crimson, purple, and pink. Over the scarlet of the
gooseberry or the gold of the high-bush mimulus along the
hills, the honeysuckle hangs its tubes of richest cream-color,
and the wild cucumber pours a shower of white over the green
leaves of the sumach or sage. Snap-dragons of blue and white,
dandelions that you must look at three or four times to be
certain what they are, thistles that are soft and tender with
flowers too pretty for the thistle family, orchids that you may
try in vain to classify, and sages and mints of which you can
barely recognize the genera, with cruciferae, compositae, and
what-not, add to the glare and confusion.

Meanwhile, the chaparral, which during the long dry season has
robed the hills in sombre green, begins to brighten with new
life; new leaves adorn the ragged red arms of the manzanita,
and among them blow thousands of little urn-shaped flowers of
rose-color and white. The bright green of one lilac is almost
lost in a luxuriance of sky-blue blossoms, and the white lilac
looks at a distance as if drifted over with snow. The
cercocarpus almost rivals the lilac in its display of white and
blue, and the dark, forbidding adenostoma now showers forth
dense panicles of little white flowers. Here, too, a new
mimulus pours floods of yellow light, and high above them all
the yucca rears its great plume of purple and white.

Thus marches on for weeks the floral procession, new turns
bringing new banners into view, or casting on old ones a
brighter light, but ever showing a riotous profusion of
splendor until member after member drops gradually out of the
ranks, and only a band of stragglers is left marching away into
the summer. But myriads of ferns, twenty-one varieties of which
are quite common, and of a fineness and delicacy rarely seen
elsewhere, still stand green in the shade of the rocks and
trees along t