THE CALIFORNIAN BUILDING.
Only a very few of the thousands of trees upon this “wooded island”—medium-sized white-oaks—are native tenants of the place. Only two years ago isolated in the more elevated dunes of a great morass, they now find themselves in strange company; the soil from the bed of the lagoon, having levelled the former slopes about their feet, is now peopled with individuals as large as themselves. Many a rare nook upon the island’s borders would defy the critical scrutiny of the botanist or artist to detect a single tell-tale evidence of artifice. Would you step from the conventional park to the wild garden in
A COVE IN WOODED ISLAND.
ten paces? Follow me through this winding path, embowered with its snowy banks of spiræa. Pry your way here beneath the branches. A few more steps, and the ripples gleam through the branches before us, and we emerge at the water’s edge beneath a tangle of willows, while a brood of white ducks, disturbed at our approach, glide out upon the mill-pond—for such indeed is the irresistible association from the surroundings. This haphazard chaos of willows and alders disarms all suspicion of artificial planting. We already anticipate the scene at the brink, and as we press our way among the yielding oziers, find ourselves listening for the familiar “c-r-o-n-k” among the spatter-docks. In a moment more we confront a tiny cove bordered with sedges and tall bulrushes, and intermingled gray-green willows and alders, while the water beneath is hidden by dense clumps of lush pickerel-weed, luxuriant in their feathery spikes of azure bloom. A tiny sportive frog leaps from the border mud, and a dragon-fly darts past on shimmering wing.
It is only as we contemplate the vista across the water that we realize the beautiful deception as yonder beetling dome, in its gilded splendor, or sunlit palaces everywhere gleaming through the waters are brought to our feet in ripples from gliding gondola, swan, or duck.
Was ever border-tangle brushed by mill-pond raft or fishing-punt more wild or spontaneous than this! Foreground and vista in endless combination and surprise greet us as we follow our course about the shore, with Flora’s own wild calendar from week to week. Here a secluded harbor, bristling with arrowheads and white with its spires of bloom, its sedgy banks aflame with cardinal flowers, whose scarlet reflections mingle with the snowy glints from the sunlit façade or spangling flashes from the crystal dome across the water. Here we invade the sheltered retreat of a bittern or small heron, which stalks away with ruffled temper at our intrusion. Creeping between the neighboring bank of alders, we emerge upon a sequestered nook shut off from the main lagoon by a small, straggling islet, plumy with willows and sedges, the main banks fringed with rushes and burr-marigolds and tall galingales that wave their graceful heads above a wild garden of blossoming blue flag. In and out among its willows beyond, the ever-present fleet of ducks glides among the dancing ripples, or snow-white swans “float double—swan and shadow,” as in the enchanted vision of “St. Mary’s Isle.”
As we leave this beguiling haunt the air is suddenly bewitched with entrancing perfume, and our fancy lit with luminous visions of the Orient from the great golden doorway which glows through the branches from the opposite brink and floods the water with its liquid replica. Attar of roses! One such inviting whiff is sufficient. Leaving the water’s edge we return toward the interior of the island, and are soon confronted by the wonderful rose-garden wherein are assembled all the roses of the world, with their thousands of varieties. Roses single and double, pink roses, white roses, roses yellow, crimson, orange, and saffron, and, indeed, of every hue but blue, mingling their beauty and their fragrance in an acre of bloom, and sprinkling the ground in showers of petals with every breeze.