Perhaps Nineteen Twentieths Of The Houses Are Built Of Bluish-Gray
Adobe Bricks, And Are Only One Or Two Stories High, Forming Fine
Cottage Homes Which Promise Simple Comfort Within.
They are set well
back from the street, leaving room for a flower garden, while almost
every one has a thrifty orchard at the sides and around the back.
The
gardens are laid out with great simplicity, indicating love for
flowers by people comparatively poor, rather than deliberate efforts
of the rich for showy artistic effects. They are like the pet gardens
of children, about as artless and humble, and harmonize with the low
dwellings to which they belong. In almost every one you find daisies,
and mint, and lilac bushes, and rows of plain English tulips. Lilacs
and tulips are the most characteristic flowers, and nowhere have I
seen them in greater perfection. As Oakland is pre-eminently a city
of roses, so is this Mormon Saints' Rest a city of lilacs and tulips.
The flowers, at least, are saintly, and they are surely loved. Scarce
a home, however obscure, is without them, and the simple,
unostentatious manner in which they are planted and gathered in pots
and boxes about the windows shows how truly they are prized.
The surrounding commons, the marshy levels of the Jordan, and dry,
gravelly lake benches on the slopes of the Wahsatch foothills are now
gay with wild flowers, chief among which are a species of phlox, with
an abundance of rich pink corollas, growing among sagebrush in showy
tufts, and a beautiful papilionaceous plant, with silky leaves and
large clusters of purple flowers, banner, wings, and keel exquisitely
shaded, a mertensia, hydrophyllum, white boragewort, orthocarpus,
several species of violets, and a tall scarlet gilia.
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