W.L. JEPSON,
in Silva of California.
JULY 15.
Huge live-oaks, silvered with a boar of lichen, stretched their boughs in fantastic frenzies. Gray fringes of moss hung from them, and tangled screens of clematis and wild grape caught the sunlight in their flickering meshes or lay over mounds of foliage like a torn green veil. ∗ ∗ ∗
For nearly two miles the carriage drive wound upward through this sylvan solitude. As it approached the house a background of emerald lawns shone through the interlacing branches, and brilliant bits of flower beds were set like pieces of mosaic between gray trunks.
GERALDINE BONNER,
in The Pioneer.
JULY 16.
The Yellow Pine is the most abundant and widely distributed tree of the forests of California and is particularly characteristic of the Sierra Nevada, where it attains its finest development. The largest trees most commonly grow along the ridges and it is the ridges which the trails ordinarily follow. Here the traveler may journey day after day, over needle-carpeted or grassy ground, mostly free of underbrush, amidst great clean shafts 40 to 150 feet high, of really massive proportions but giving a sense of lightness by reason of their color, symmetry, and great height. No two trunks in detail of bark are modeled exactly alike, for each has its own particular finish; so it is that the eye never wearies of the fascination of the Yellow Pine but travels contentedly from trunk to trunk and wanders satisfyingly up and down their splendid columns—the finest of any pine.
W.L. JEPSON,
in Silva of California.