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conditions under which the redwood forest exists are clearly revealed; narrow cañons run seaward and meet others, until great winding mountain basins are formed, and in these are the centers of the lumbering industry. Islands of mountain rise out of the forest, the largest of them nearly two thousand feet high, but the general level of the oak ridges that cross and divide the "land of the redwood" into groups of forests is hardly twelve hundred feet. Dark green, misty with the smoke of fires, is the prevailing color of the dense redwoods, but the whole expanse of broken country is spotted with broad seas of old gold-they are hilltops and slopes of ripe grass, although it is hardly midsummer. Here are the scattered pastures of the Coast Range; they descend far down into the redwoods, but near the edges of the oaks they cluster and increase toward the eastern horizon until they grow to be the broadest and most luminous slopes of color

redwood in perfection. In such places there are often rings of great trees inclosing pits five or six feet deep, and thirty, forty, or even fifty feet in diameter. Each of these pits is supposed to show where the venerable ancestor of the surrounding circle of trees once stood. Long before it fell, innumerable sprouts grew from the yet living roots. Afterward, when the giant yielded, the rains washed new soil into the "bottoms" from the mountain-sides, to fill the deep chasm. For a century or so there was a struggle among the children of the fallen monarch, and at last only seven or eight remained, to become great trees of twelve feet in diameter set on the rim of the pit formed by the decay of the roots of the ancient tree, and each having a complete root system of its own. Other trees, seedlings or sprouts, grow up between them, and in a few more centuries the process of forming another redwood-tree ring will be repeated about the largest of the second

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MANZANITA.

their innumerable branches, and shut out all but faint blue sparkles of the sky. The dust of one of the pioneers is underfoot, and a little tree of last year's growth is struggling to gain a place. The red-bronze trunks of the trees stand like a wall, hiding the rise of the mountains, hiding the banks of the river, though one hears the sound of its flow, and the splash of little trout streams in the cañons. Such groves as this are the temples of the California forest system.

In the Coast Range, belonging somewhat to the redwood belt, and somewhat to the oak openings, but not wholly to either, is a tree that is dear to the heart of poet, artist, and nature-lover. It is an arbutus, by family rights, but it is a glorified arbutus that rivals the Magnolia grandiflora, or any other tree of the continent. Many a writer and many a famous botanist have tried to make those who have never seen a madroño understand its grace and color, but it remains the despair of sylvan description. The madroño fully compensates California for the absence of the lovely whitebirch stems, and of the scarlet sumac in autumn. Its flowers are insignificant, but its berries outshine the holly, and are infinitely more striking, while the glory of its bright green leaves is a constant joy. The young madroños grow in thickets like young mountain maples, and have long, straight, shining stems, no two alike in color, but ranging in the same thicket from light green almost to yellow, and from yellow to brownish red and rose-tinted purple. Nothing else that I have ever seen in the forest is quite so fresh, so clean, and so richly tinted as a madroño thicket.

The large evergreen leaves sometimes grow in whorls, almost like a Norfolk Island pine, and the light is reflected in so many ways from the smooth stems that an artist would find as many fleshtints as in a garden of girls; each separate stem is worth study. The bark is smooth, with a soft texture finer than a kid glove, and glowing as if it held a different sort of life from that of the young oaks that stand a little apart. Unless there is a hamadryad in the

madroño, none are left in earthly forests.

Apart from the thickets, comparatively few single madroños are seen. In fact, some districts contain only dwarfed and shrub-like madroños, but in other places there are great trees from eighty to one hundred feet high that more than fulfil the shy promise of the slender shining stems of the madroño thickets. There are not many such trees, and no photograph can serve to illustrate their magnificence. One in Sonoma County stands on a cliff,- an old tree, deeply scarred by fire. It is as picturesque as an olive or a cypress, with the added expression of color so varied and comprehensive that artists come from the valley below and make studies of it against the blue sky or the dark cliff. The old bark is rough, with very striking red-brown knots and bosses like dark armor, among which are perfectly smooth golden or olive-green or almost scarlet patches of shining, exquisite color. Every month of the year one who studies such a tree will discover changes; every madroño in the mountains has its especial and separate tints of color, its own peculiar charm of manner, its noteworthy combination of the more mature bark with the fresh, changeable, and transparent covering that is like the skin of a child. The very oldest madroño in California is grizzled only about the trunk; even the large branches keep the young look, and each little twig is as fresh as if it belonged to a madroño thicket. For a space below the beautiful crowns of leaves, as large and nearly as dark as the leaves of Magnolia grandiflora, the new wood is light, clear-hued green, yellowing downward. Then comes that rich, firm scarlet, so

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brilliant that one could easily believe the saying of an old Sonoma pioneer, that when he was out late on the mountain he "had to see his way by the mathrone stems; they kep' the light an hour longer than anything else." As the new bark grows on the madroño, flakes of the old fall to the ground and lie there in crisp, dainty piles of brightness.

Another of the beautiful heaths, to which the arbutus, the leucothoës, the rhododendron, and many other striking shrubs and trees belong, is the manzanita. One species, the uva-ursi, or bearberry, extends around the world, but nearly all are Californian, nine or ten species being peculiar to this State. They are shrubs or small trees, with smooth bark ranging in color from that of the madroño to a rich and dark-red purple. The thick oval leaves and the clusters of fragrant white or rose-colored urn-shaped flowers add to the attractiveness of the manzanita. Its crooked stems are beginning to be known in the cane-shops, and the knots and roots have many ornamental uses. Thousands of acres of manzanita thicket have been cleared to plant vineyard and orchard; the dainty little tree seems to occupy some of

makes a wonderful display. From December to April, according to the locality and the season, one can find bushes on the hillside raining down an inch-thick carpet of blossoms, day after day, and still clothed in fragrance and beauty so charming that even the old residents of the manzanita region speak of the time of its blossoming as the prime of the California spring. The stages of the mining counties stop for passengers to break off branches, and groups of campers use the manzanita when in bloom for the decoration of tents and tables. The gorgeous flame-hued eschscholtzia has been chosen for the State flower, for it belongs everywhere, and illuminates valley and hillside alike, but nothing among the distinctive plants of California takes precedence of the dainty manzanita. More brilliant in their seasons of bloom are the two rhododendrons that make huge masses of color beside mountain springs, and the lilac-like thickets of ceanothuses in the shady redwoods; but none of these have the delicate hue and the rare fragrance that make the manzanita unique among shrubs.

In all the mountain cañons are broad-leaved maples, which grow in copses that are worthy

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the shining stems of a hundred or more maples growing at the head of a gulch between pines and madroños. The buckeve has something of the same gray-andwhite mottling, and so have several of the oaks. There is a little tree, something like a cottonwood, that grows in the Sierras, which has a soft and shining bark of creamy white, flecked with brown spots. This tree, hardly less than the maple of the Coast Range cañons, reminds one of the white birch.

One hardly knows where to begin with an account of the numerous California oaks that form the most distinctive feature of the valleys of the State. As far as appearance goes, there are no finer oaks in the world, but their timber, except that of a few species, is not yet considered of much economic value. Professor Edward L.. Greene of the University of California, in his monograph on the subject, illustrates about twenty-five distinct species of "West American Oaks," and describes several varieties of lesser importance. There are not only white oaks, and some of the finest species known among all the three hundred oaks of the world, but also black oaks, both deciduints and evergreen, and a species of oak that to dimost as much of a chestnut as it is an oak. Che thing seems to the botanist worth mention, and that is the curious fact that typical free of the California oaks are very much mo, like the oaks of Europe than like the

EUCALYPTUS.

ENGRAVED BY GEORGE P. BARTLE

oaks of the Atlantic slope. In growth and general appearance the oak groves of England are closely reproduced in California. Experience shows that the European species of oak grows easily and rapidly in California, while the common oaks of the Atlantic slope grow but poorly. One or two species of western "water-oaks seem to suit the Pacific coast, but even these do not thrive as well as the English oak.

When American pioneers came into unfenced California, oak forests almost filled the valleys. The trees were not crowded; they seemed planted in vast park-like landscapes for miles. Up the Coast Range one could literally ride

from San Diego to the edge of the redwood them over long, open slopes of wild oats, country without ever being a mile from groups thick-sown with larkspurs and eschscholtzias; of gigantic oaks. In the same way, the whole beyond them the mountain drops suddenly valley edge along the base of the Sierras, from to the level of valley and river. A remarkFort Tejon to Fort Reading, was thick-sown; able habit of the live-oaks (Quercus agrifolia) the Upper Sacramento was especially a land is to marshal themselves in military lines and of oaks, which it still remains. Not only "Paso groups along the smaller ravines that lead Robles," but every pass in the foot-hills from upward from the large cañons, and so to one watershed to another, was truly a "pass of serve, in some measure, as sentinels that disthe oaks." Most of the famous fords that the tinguish the watersheds and slopes of the gold-seekers knew over the Calaveras, the Tuo- range. The knolls and hilltops between seem lumne, the Consumnes, the Yuba, the Feather, nearly treeless, except for a few scattered pines. and hundreds of other rivers, were in the midst The rounded heads of oak after oak, in long of giant oaks. Every county and district has curving lines, occasionally massed on the brow some tree of local fame, and the time may come of a hill, where they stand against the sky, form when the history of the individual oaks of Cali- one of the most noteworthy features of the fornia will be of much interest. The most landscape over a large portion of California. prominent white oak of the valleys is Quercus lobata, a tree that often grows a hundred feet high. This species, and the leading evergreen species of the coast, the agrifolia, were discovered by Neé, the botanist. General Frémont, who camped on the Stanislaus River in 1846, makes special mention of the superb white oak. Professor Newberry, writing in 1853 of the Cache Creek country, says:

This timber-belt is composed of the most magnificent oaks I have ever seen. They are not crowded as in our [Atlantic State] forests, but grow scattered about singly or in groups, with open, grass-covered glades between them. The trunks, often seven feet in diameter, soon divide into branches which spread over an area of which the diameter is considerably greater than the height of the tree. There is no undergrowth beneath them, and as far as the eye can reach when standing among them, an unending series of great trunks is seen rising from the lawnlike surface.

A striking feature of the summits of the mountain ridges is the manner in which clumps of oaks occupy great hill-forts. Our highland oaks love to grow on isolated masses of rock, either alone or with pines and laurels. Some of the most characteristic trees of the species can be found crowning such rock fortresses on the points of otherwise naked promontories. One easily reaches

VOL. XLIV.- 110.

One of the finest single oaks known is the Sir Joseph Hooker tree on General Bidwell's Rancho Chico in northern California. When that distinguished botanist visited the region in company with Dr. Asa Gray, he declared that this tree "was in all probability as large and perfect an oak as any in existence." This oak and several others of well-deserved fame, a few notable redwoods, one or two madroños, the famous cypresses of Monterey, and some noble pines of different species, should be set apart and protected as completely as the Sierra sequoias. Two or three well-chosen reservations of a thousand acres apiece-one in Shasta or Siskiyou, another in Mendocino, and a third in Santa Cruz-would preserve fine specimens of nearly all of the native shrubs and trees of California, and also several of the best oak forests that are left unspoiled.

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CYPRESS POINT, MONTEREY.

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