Larkspurs In The Botany
Are Blue, But If You Were To Slip Rein To The Stub Of Some Black
Sage And Set About Proving It You Would Be Still At It By The Hour
When The White Gilias Set Their Pale Disks To The Westering
Sun.
This is the gilia the children call "evening snow," and it is
no use trying to improve on children's names for wild flowers.
From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a
shifty yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then
as soon as ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the
sidelong ranges, come little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the
edge of the sand. By dusk there are tiny drifts in the lee of
every strong shrub, rosy-tipped corollas as riotous in the sliding
mesa wind as if they were real flakes shaken out of a cloud, not
sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch stems. They keep awake
all night, and all the air is heavy and musky sweet because of
them.
Farther south on the trail there will be poppies meeting ankle
deep, and singly, peacock-painted bubbles of calochortus blown out
at the tops of tall stems. But before the season is in tune for
the gayer blossoms the best display of color is in the lupin wash.
There is always a lupin wash somewhere on the mesa trail,--a broad,
shallow, cobble-paved sink of vanished waters, where the hummocks
of Lupinus ornatus run a delicate gamut from silvery green
of spring to silvery white of winter foliage.
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