several
fine species of brodiaea, Ithuriel's spear, and others less prized are
common, and the favorite calochortus, or Mariposa lily, a unique genus
of many species, something like the tulips of Europe but far finer. Most
of them grow on the warm foothills below the Valley, but two charming
species, C. coeruleus and C. nudus, dwell in springy places on the
Wawona road a few miles beyond the brink of the walls.

The snow plant (Sarcodes sanguinea) is more admired by tourists than any
other in California. It is red, fleshy and watery and looks like a
gigantic asparagus shoot. Soon after the snow is off the round it rises
through the dead needles and humus in the pine and fir woods like a
bright glowing pillar of fire. In a week or so it grows to a height of
eight or twelve inches with a diameter of an inch and a half or two
inches; then its long fringed bracts curl aside, allowing the twenty- or
thirty-five-lobed, bell-shaped flowers to open and look straight out
from the axis. It is said to grow up through the snow; on the contrary,
it always waits until the ground is warm, though with other early
flowers it is occasionally buried or half-buried for a day or two
by spring storms. The entire plant--flowers, bracts, stem, scales,
and roots--is fiery red. Its color could appeal to one's blood.
Nevertheless, it is a singularly cold and unsympathetic plant. Everybody
admires it as a wonderful curiosity, but nobody loves it as lilies,
violets, roses, daisies are loved. Without fragrance, it stands beneath
the pines and firs lonely and silent, as if unacquainted with any other
plant in the world; never moving in the wildest storms; rigid as if
lifeless, though covered with beautiful rosy flowers.

Far the most delightful and fragrant of the Valley flowers is the
Washington lily, white, moderate in size, with from three- to
ten-flowered racemes. I found one specimen in the lower end of the
Valley at the foot of the Wawona grade that was eight feet high, the
raceme two feet long, with fifty-two flowers, fifteen of them open;
the others had faded or were still in the bud. This famous lily is
distributed over the sunny portions of the sugar-pine woods, never in
large meadow-garden companies like the large and the small tiger lilies
(pardalinum and parvum), but widely scattered, standing up to the waist
in dense ceanothus and manzanita chaparral, waving its lovely flowers
above the blooming wilderness of brush, and giving their f