![[RUBY LILY—Lilium rubescens.]](#3624944100741987669_f024.png.id-8089978637733723355.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
The favorite haunts of this lily are high and inaccessible ridges, among the chaparral, or under the live-oak or redwood. Comparatively few people know of its existence, though living within a few miles of it, because they rarely ever visit these out-of-the-way fastnesses of nature.
Mr. Burroughs has somewhere said: "Genius is a specialty; it does not grow in every soil, it skips the many and touches the few; and the gift of perfume to a flower is a special grace, like genius or like beauty, and never becomes common or cheap." Certainly these blossoms have been richly endowed with this charming gift, and their delicious fragrance wafted by the wind often betrays their presence upon a hillside when unsuspected before, so that one skilled in woodcraft can often trace them by it.
THISTLE-POPPY. CHICALOTE.
Argemone platyceras, Link and Otto. Poppy Family.
Stems.—One to two and one half feet high; hispid throughout, or armed with rigid bristles or prickles. Sap yellow. Leaves.—Thistle-like; three to six inches long. Flowers.—White; two to four inches in diameter. Sepals.—Three; spinosely beaked. Petals.—Four to six. Stamens.—Numerous. Filaments slender. Ovary.—Oblong; one-celled. Stigma three- or four-lobed. Capsule very prickly. Hab.—Dry hillsides from Central California southward.
The thistle-poppy would be considered in any other country a surpassingly beautiful flower, with its large diaphanous white petals and its thistly gray-green foliage, but in California it must yield precedence to the Matilija poppy. It resembles the latter very closely in its flower, and is often mistaken for it. It may be known by its yellow juice, its prickly foliage, and its very prickly capsules. I believe the flowers are somewhat more cup-shaped than those of Romneya.
It affects dry hill-slopes and valleys, often otherwise barren, where it grows luxuriantly, and sometimes attains a height of six feet, being in full bloom in May. There, where one is unprepared for such a sight, it becomes an object of startling beauty.