Let us again consider the undergrowth in the forest. Where shrubs and tender growths abound the wintry season cannot be desolate or dreary. When the display of summer is over they attract the eye by their bright fruits and their habits of growth. Their branchlets are often strikingly pretty in color and well set off against the snow. Their intricate traceries of twig and stem are an interesting study. The copses of brown hazels that spread along the mountain side and the dusky alders or yellow-tinted willows are in perfect harmony with this season of the year.
It is by crowding into masses that our shrubs of brighter blossom produce some of the most superb effects of spring. A multitude of rhododendrons or great laurels covers some mountain side, carrying its drifts of pale rose far back into the woods. A mass of redbuds and flowering dogwoods, the former again rose-colored, the latter a creamy white, pours out from the forest’s edge among ledges of rock and low hills. The wild plums and thorns, with their delicate flowers, are beautiful in the same manner, and in addition have a pretty habit of straying out and away from the woods, much like the red juniper.
Our shrubs are no less beautiful in their separate parts than they are magnificent in their united profusion. The common sweet magnolia is especially well favored. Its elegantly elliptical leaf, with smooth surfaces, glossy and dark green above, silken and silvery below, is one of the most attractive to be found. Its flower cannot help being beautiful, for beauty is the heritage of all the magnolias. Often, however, half the pure ivory cups lie hidden in the leaves, to surprise us on a closer approach with their beauty and sweet fragrance. Altogether this favored shrub is one of the most exquisite objects of decoration, whether in the swamp, along brooksides, or through the damp places of the forest.
The hawthorns, which, like the sweet magnolia, occur both as trees and as shrubs, combine varied forms of attractiveness, such as compound flowers of white or pinkish hue; sharply edged, elegantly pointed leaves; bright berries; and closely interwoven branchlets stuck about with thorns. The redbud, which I have already mentioned, holds its little bunches of flowers so lightly that they look as if they had been carried there by the wind and had caught along the twigs and branches. Very different from these, yet no less interesting in its way, is the staghorn sumach, which is of erratic growth and bears stately pyramids of velvety flowers of a dark crimson-maroon. There is a fine contrast, too, where the serviceberry, with early delicate white blossoms, blooms among the evergreens and the opening leaves of spring.
Another word about the West. The undergrowth of the northerly portion of the Pacific coast region has already been referred to; but there extends throughout the Southwest, penetrating also northward and eastward, another kind of forest growth that is so distinct in character from all others that it should be specially described. It is, in fact, quite opposite in its nature to the shrubbery of the more humid forest regions in that it shows a tendency to seek the arid, open, sunny slopes, where it forms a scrubby, though interesting, and varied cover to the rough granite boulders and loose, gravelly soils. This growth is everywhere conveniently known as “chaparral,” whether it be the low, even-colored brush on the higher mountains or the dense, scraggy, promiscuous, and impenetrable thicket of the foothills and lower and gentler slopes.
The impression which the chaparral makes depends largely upon the distance at which it is viewed. If we stand in the midst of a dense patch of it we see of how many elements it is composed; how the shrubs of different size, shape, and character crowd each other into a tangle of branches, some not reaching above the waist, others closing in overhead. The ceanothus, with its dull, dark-green foliage and bunches of small white flowers, which appear in June, stands beside the stout-stemmed, knotty, twisted manzanita, with its strikingly reddish-brown bark and sticky, orbicular, olive-colored leaves. Among smaller shrubs we find the aromatic sage brush, of a light-gray, soft appearance, and the richer, darker, small-leaved grease-wood, or chemisal, as it is more commonly called farther north, with its small, white-petaled flowers enclosing a greenish-yellow center. Very plentifully scattered among all these we usually find the scrubby forms of the canyon live oak and the California black oak. Here and there we may see a large golden-flowered mallow, or the queenly yucca raising its fine pyramid of cream-colored flowers out of the dense mass.
The far view is quite different. Distance smoothes the surface and somewhat obliterates the colors, though we may still distinguish a variegated appearance. The eye takes in the larger outlines and the scattered pines that sometimes occur within the chaparral. Nor is the latter, as we now perceive, always a dense growth, but may be separated here and there. Indeed, it is often most interesting when interrupted by large granite boulders and jumbles of rocks, with the clean gray shade of which it forms a fine contrast on a clear morning.
A Yucca in the Chaparral