Evergreen shrubs or small trees; eight to thirty feet high. Leaves.—Alternate; holly-like; an inch or two long. Flowers.—White; three lines across; in racemes eighteen lines to three inches long. Calyx.—Five-cleft. Petals.—Five; spreading. Stamens.—Twelve to twenty-five. Ovary.—Solitary; one-celled. Style terminal. Fruit.—A dark red cherry, becoming black; six lines in diameter. Hab.—Coast Ranges, San Francisco into Lower California.
The holly-leaved cherry is a very ornamental shrub, with its shining, prickly evergreen leaves, and it is coming more and more into favor for cultivation, especially as a hedge-shrub. In its natural state it attains its greatest perfection in the mountains near Santa Barbara and southward. On dry hills it is only a shrub, but in the rich soil of cañon bottoms it becomes a tree. Some of the finest specimens are to be found in the gardens of the old missions, where they have been growing probably a century.
Dr. Behr tells us that the foliage, in withering, develops hydrocyanic acid, the odor of which is quite perceptible. The leaves are then poisonous to sheep and cattle.
The shrubs are especially beautiful in spring, after they have made their new growth of bright green at the ends of the branches, and put forth a profusion of feathery bloom. The blossoms have the pleasant, bitter fragrance of the cultivated cherry, and attract myriads of bees, who make the region vocal with their busy hum. The fruit, which ripens from September to December, is disappointing, owing to its very thin pulp, though its astringent and acid flavor is not unpleasant.
It was used by the aborigines as food, however, and made into an intoxicating drink by fermentation. The meat of the stones ground and made into balls constituted a delicate morsel with them.
YERBA BUENA.
Micromeria Douglasii, Benth. Mint Family.
Aromatic trailing vines. Stems.—Slender; one to four feet long. Leaves.—One inch long; round-ovate. Flowers.—Solitary; axillary; white or purplish. Calyx.—Five-toothed; two lines long. Corolla.—Five lines long; bilabiate. Stamens.—Four; in pairs on the corolla. Ovary.—Of four seedlike nutlets. Style filiform. Stigma unevenly two-lipped. Hab.—Vancouver Island to Los Angeles County.
The yerba buena is as dear to the Californian as the Mayflower to the New Englander, and is as intimately associated with the early traditions of this Western land as is that delicate blossom with the stormy past of the Pilgrim Fathers. Its delicious, aromatic perfume seems in some subtle way to link those early days of the Padres with our own, and to call up visions of the long, low, rambling mission buildings of adobe, with their picturesque red-tiled roofs; the flocks and herds tended by gentle shepherds in cowls; and the angelus sounding from those quaint belfries, and vibrating in ever-widening circles over hill and vale.
Before the coming of the Mission Fathers, the Indians used this little herb, placing great faith in its medicinal virtues, so that the Padres afterward bestowed upon it the name of "yerba buena"—"the good herb." It is still used among our Spanish-Californians in the form of a tea, both as a pleasant beverage and as a febrifuge, and also as a remedy for indigestion and other disorders.