A Very
Poet's Flower, I Thought; Not Fit For Gathering Up, And Proving A
Nuisance In The Pastures, Therefore Needing To Be The More Loved.
And one day I caught Winnenap' drawing out from mid leaf a
fine strong fibre for making snares.
The borders of the iris
fields are pure gold, nearly sessile buttercups and a
creeping-stemmed composite of a redder hue. I am convinced that
English-speaking children will always have buttercups. If they do
not light upon the original companion of little frogs they will
take the next best and cherish it accordingly. I find five
unrelated species loved by that name, and as many more and as
inappropriately called cowslips.
By every mesa spring one may expect to find a single shrub of
the buckthorn, called of old time Cascara sagrada--the
sacred bark. Up in the canons, within the limit of the rains, it
seeks rather a stony slope, but in the dry valleys is not found
away from water borders.
In all the valleys and along the desert edges of the west are
considerable areas of soil sickly with alkali-collecting pools,
black and evil-smelling like old blood. Very little grows
hereabout but thick-leaved pickle weed. Curiously enough, in
this stiff mud, along roadways where there is frequently a little
leakage from canals, grows the only western representative of the
true heliotropes (Heliotropium curassavicum). It has
flowers of faded white, foliage of faded green, resembling the
"live-for-ever" of old gardens and graveyards, but even less
attractive.
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