One of the richest wild gardens I know is a bare, open spot in a cottonwood grove, part of it tunneled by ants, which run over it by millions, and the rest a jumble of bowlders and wild rosebushes, impossible to describe. In this spot, unshaded from the burning sun, flourish flowers innumerable. Rosebushes, towering far above one's head, loaded with bloom; shrubs of several kinds, equally burdened by delicate white or pink blossoms; the ground covered with foot-high pentstemons, blue and lavender, in which the buds fairly get in each other's way; and a curious plant—primrose, I believe—which opens every morning, a few inches from the ground, a large white blossom like the magnolia, turns it deep pink, and closes it before night; several kinds of yellow flowers; wild geraniums, with a look of home in their daintily penciled petals; above all, the wonderful golden columbine. I despair of picturing this grand flower to eyes accustomed to the insignificant columbine of the East. The blossom is three times the size of its Eastern namesake, growing in clumps sometimes three feet across, with thirty or forty stems of flowers standing two and a half feet high. In hue it is a delicate straw color, sometimes all one tint, sometimes with outside petals of snowy white, and rarely with those outsiders of lavender. It is a red-letter day when the flower-lover comes upon a clump of the lavender-leaved columbine. Far up in the mountains is found still another variety of this beautiful flower, with outside petals of a rich blue. This, I believe, is the State flower of Colorado.
I am surprised at the small number of flowers here with which I am familiar. I think there are not more than half a dozen in all this extraordinary "procession of flowers" that I ever saw before. In consequence, every day promises discoveries, every walk is exciting as an excursion into unknown lands, each new find is a fresh treasure.
VI.
A CINDERELLA AMONG FLOWERS.
Like torches lit for carnival,
The fiery lilies straight and tall
Burn where the deepest shadow is;
Still dance the columbines cliff-hung,
And like a broidered veil outflung
The many-blossomed clematis.
Susan Coolidge.
A rough, scraggy plant, with unattractive, dark-green foliage and a profusion of buds standing out at all angles, is, in July, almost the only growing thing to be seen on the barren-looking mesa around Colorado Springs. Anything more unpromising can hardly be imagined; the coarsest thistle is a beauty beside it; the common burdock has a grace of growth far beyond it; the meanest weed shows a color which puts it to shame. Yet if the curious traveler pass that way again, late in the afternoon, he shall find that "Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." He will see the bush transfigured; its angular form hidden under a mass of many pointed stars of snowy whiteness, with clusters of pale gold stamens. Then will stand revealed the "superb mentzelia," a true Cinderella, fit only for ignominious uses in the morning, but a suitable bride for the fairy prince in the evening.