GROUNDSEL-TREE.
Baccharis pilularis, DC. Composite Family.
Evergreen diœcious shrubs, one to twelve feet high, with angled or striate branches. Leaves.—Alternate; sessile; obovate; cuneate; obtuse; coarsely toothed; leathery; one inch or less long. Flower-heads.—Crowded at the ends of the branchlets; four lines long; one or two across; without ray-flowers. Involucres.—Oblong; of many imbricated scales. Sterile heads.—With funnel-form, five-lobed corollas. Fertile heads.—With filiform corollas, mixed with a dense white silky pappus, which soon elongates. Hab.—All along the Coast.
[PRINCE'S PINE—Chimaphila Menziesii.]
![[PRINCE'S PINE—Chimaphila Menziesii.]](#3624944100741987669_f034.png.id-5503132105416350199.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
In the fall, the dark-green foliage of the groundsel-tree is relieved by its abundant small white flower-clusters. The flowers of the male shrub are never very beautiful, being usually of a yellowish or dirty white; indeed, so little resembling the other, as to appear like a separate species. But when the white silk down of the female shrub is fully expanded, its boughs are laden as with drifted snow. This lavish provision of silk is designed by nature for the wafting abroad of the seed.
It varies greatly in size and habit. Upon exposed, wind-swept sandhills it is low and close-cropped, but in more favorable localities, where the soil is rich and the climate more genial, it responds graciously to the changed conditions, becoming one of our most picturesque shrubs.
Growing and blooming at the same time with the above, may be found its near relative—B. Douglasii, DC. This does not aspire to shrubhood, but its tall stems, with their lanceolate, somewhat glutinous leaves, sometimes reach four feet in height, bearing at summit their pretty Ageratum-like, white flower-clusters. It loves the sandy soil of creek-banks and low fields, and is abundant from San Francisco to Los Angeles.