This Has Pale Pea-Green Glossy
Leaves Two Or Three Inches Long And Half An Inch Wide And Beautiful
Pink Flowers, Urn-Shaped, That Make A Fine, Rich Show.
The berries
are black when ripe, are extremely abundant, and, with the
huckleberries, form an important part of the food of the Indians, who
beat them into paste, dry them, and store them away for winter use, to
be eaten with their oily fish.
The salmon-berry also is very
plentiful, growing in dense prickly tangles. The flowers are as large
as wild roses and of the same color, and the berries measure nearly an
inch in diameter. Besides these there are gooseberries, currants,
raspberries, blackberries, and, in some favored spots, strawberries.
The mass of the underbrush of the woods is made up in great part of
these berry-bearing bushes. Together with white-flowered spiraea
twenty feet high, hazel, dogwood, wild rose, honeysuckle,
symphoricarpus, etc. But in the depths of the woods, where little
sunshine can reach the ground, there is but little underbrush of any
kind, only a very light growth of huckleberry and rubus and young
maples in most places. The difficulties encountered by the explorer
in penetrating the wilderness are presented mostly by the streams and
bogs, with their tangled margins, and the fallen timber and thick
carpet of moss covering all the ground.
Notwithstanding the tremendous energy displayed in lumbering and the
grand scale on which it is being carried on, and the number of
settlers pushing into every opening in search of farmlands, the woods
of Washington are still almost entirely virgin and wild, without trace
of human touch, savage or civilized.
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