It Seems To Thrive Best In An Atmosphere Of Suffocation.
The middle Sierras fall off abruptly eastward toward
the high valleys.
Peaks of the fourteen thousand class, belted
with sombre swathes of pine, rise almost directly from the bench
lands with no foothill approaches. At the lower edge of the bench
or mesa the land falls away, often by a fault, to the river
hollows, and along the drop one looks for springs or intermittent
swampy swales. Here the plant world resembles a little the lake
gardens, modified by altitude and the use the town folk put it to
for pasture. Here are cress, blue violets, potentilla, and, in the
damp of the willow fence-rows, white false asphodels. I am sure we
make too free use of this word FALSE in naming plants--false
mallow, false lupine, and the like. The asphodel is at least no
falsifier, but a true lily by all the heaven-set marks, though
small of flower and run mostly to leaves, and should have a name
that gives it credit for growing up in such celestial semblance.
Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it acres
wide, that in the spring season of full bloom make an airy
fluttering as of azure wings. Single flowers are too thin and
sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full fields
have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand, and
quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal.
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