These are the
displaying grounds of the gentians--blue--blue--eye-blue,
perhaps, virtuous and likable flowers. One is not surprised to
learn that they have tonic properties. But if your meadow should
be outside the forest reserve, and the sheep have been there, you
will find little but the shorter, paler G. newberryii, and
in the matted sods of the little tongues of greenness that lick up
among the pines along the watercourses, white, scentless, nearly
stemless, alpine violets.
At about the nine thousand foot level and in the summer there
will be hosts of rosy-winged dodecatheon, called shooting-stars,
outlining the crystal tunnels in the sod. Single flowers have
often a two-inch spread of petal, and the full, twelve blossomed
heads above the slender pedicels have the airy effect of wings.
It is about this level one looks to find the largest lakes
with thick ranks of pines bearing down on them, often swamped in
the summer floods and paying the inevitable penalty for such
encroachment. Here in wet coves of the hills harbors that crowd of
bloom that makes the wonder of the Sierra canons.
They drift under the alternate flicker and gloom of the windy
rooms of pines, in gray rock shelters, and by the ooze of blind
springs, and their juxtapositions are the best imaginable. Lilies
come up out of fern beds, columbine swings over meadowsweet, white
rein-orchids quake in the leaning grass. Open swales,
where in wet years may be running water, are plantations of false
hellebore (Veratrum californicum), tall, branched candelabra
of greenish bloom above the sessile, sheathing, boat-shaped leaves,
semi-translucent in the sun. A stately plant of the lily family,
but why "false?" It is frankly offensive in its character, and its
young juices deadly as any hellebore that ever grew.
Like most mountain herbs, it has an uncanny haste to bloom.
One hears by night, when all the wood is still, the crepitatious
rustle of the unfolding leaves and the pushing flower-stalk within,
that has open blossoms before it has fairly uncramped from the
sheath. It commends itself by a certain exclusiveness of growth,
taking enough room and never elbowing; for if the flora of the lake
region has a fault it is that there is too much of it. We have
more than three hundred species from Kearsarge Canon alone, and if
that does not include them all it is because they were already
collected otherwhere.
One expects to find lakes down to about nine thousand feet,
leading into each other by comparatively open ripple slopes and
white cascades. Below the lakes are filled basins that are still
spongy swamps, or substantial meadows, as they get down and down.
