In the spring it puts forth great panicles of small, white, waxen bells, which call the bees to a sybaritic feast, and in the autumn it spreads a no less inviting repast in its great clusters of fine scarlet berries for the blue pigeons who visit it in large flocks.
The wood of the madrone is hard and close-grained, of a light brown, shaded with red, with lighter-colored sap-wood. It is used in the manufacture of furniture, but is particularly valuable for the making of charcoal to be used in the composition of gunpowder. The bark is sometimes used in tanning leather.
WILD WHITE LILAC.
Ceanothus velutinus, Dougl. Buckthorn Family.
Widely branching shrubs, two to six feet or more high. Leaves.—Alternate; petioled; roundish, or broadly ovate; eighteen lines to three inches long; polished, resinous above; somewhat pubescent beneath; strongly three-nerved. Flowers.—White; three lines across; in large, dense, compound clusters four or five inches long and wide. (See Ceanothus for flower structure.) Hab.—Coast Ranges; Columbia River, southward to San Francisco Bay; also eastward to Colorado.
Its ample bright-green, highly varnished leaves and large white flower-clusters make this a very beautiful species of Ceanothus. The foliage is glutinous with a gummy exudation, which has a rather disagreeable odor. Yet the shrub would be very handsome in cultivation.
WHITE NEMOPHILA.
Nemophila atomaria, Fisch. and Mey. Baby-eyes or Waterleaf Family.
Corolla.—Pure white, closely dark-dotted nearly to the edge; an inch or less across; densely hairy within the tube. Scales of the corolla narrow, with long hairs. (Otherwise as N. insignis.) Hab.—Central California.
This delicate Nemophila haunts wet, springy places among the hills, and is at its best in early spring. There are a number of small-flowered forms of Nemophila which have been hitherto referred to N. parviflora, but which the future will probably prove to constitute a number of species.