It is wholesome, however, and is eaten by
birds, bears, Indians, and many other adventurers, great and small.
Passing from beneath the shadows of the woods where the trees grow
close and high, we step into charming wild gardens full of lilies,
orchids, heathworts, roses, etc., with colors so gay and forming such
sumptuous masses of bloom, they make the gardens of civilization,
however lovingly cared for, seem pathetic and silly. Around the great
fire-mountains, above the forests and beneath the snow, there is a
flowery zone of marvelous beauty planted with anemones, erythroniums,
daisies, bryanthus, kalmia, vaccinium, cassiope, saxifrages, etc.,
forming one continuous garden fifty or sixty miles in circumference,
and so deep and luxuriant and closely woven it seems as if Nature,
glad to find an opening, were economizing space and trying to see how
may of her bright-eyed darlings she can get together in one mountain
wreath.
Along the slopes of the Cascades, where the woods are less dense,
especially about the headwaters of the Willamette, there are miles of
rhododendron, making glorious outbursts of purple bloom, and down on
the prairies in rich, damp hollows the blue-flowered camassia grows in
such profusion that at a little distance its dense masses appear as
beautiful blue lakes imbedded in the green, flowery plains; while all
about the streams and the lakes and the beaver meadows and the margins
of the deep woods there is a magnificent tangle of gaultheria and
huckleberry bushes with their myriads of pink bells, reinforced with
hazel, cornel, rubus of many species, wild plum, cherry, and crab
apple; besides thousands of charming bloomers to be found in all sorts
of places throughout the wilderness whose mere names are refreshing,
such as linnaea, menziesia, pyrola, chimaphila, brodiaea, smilacina,
fritillaria, calochortus, trillium, clintonia, veratrum, cypripedium,
goodyera, spiranthes, habenaria, and the rare and lovely "Hider of the
North," Calypso borealis, to find which is alone a sufficient object
for a journey into the wilderness. And besides these there is a
charming underworld of ferns and mosses flourishing gloriously beneath
all the woods.
Everybody loves wild woods and flowers more or less. Seeds of all
these Oregon evergreens and of many of the flowering shrubs and plants
have been sent to almost every country under the sun, and they are now
growing in carefully tended parks and gardens. And now that the ways
of approach are open one would expect to find these woods and gardens
full of admiring visitors reveling in their beauty like bees in a
clover field. Yet few care to visit them. A portion of the bark of
one of the California trees, the mere dead skin, excited the wondering
attention of thousands when it was set up in the Crystal Palace in
London, as did also a few peeled spars, the shafts of mere saplings
from Oregon or Washington. Could one of these great silver firs or
sugar pines three hundred feet high have been transplanted entire to
that exhibition, how enthusiastic would have been the praises accorded
to it!
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