In Spring And Early Summer The Low-Lying Areas About Canada Seca Were
Pleasant Places To See And Ride On Where The Pigs Had Not Defaced
Them:
They kept their bright verdure when the higher grounds were
parched and brown; then too, after rain, they were made beautiful with
the bright little yellow flower called _macachina_.
As the _macachina_ was the first wild flower to blossom in the land it
had as great an attraction to us children as the wild strawberry,
ground-ivy, celandine, and other first blooms for the child in
England. Our liking for our earliest flower was all the greater
because we could eat it and liked its acid taste, also because it had
a bulb very nice to eat - a small round bulb the size of a hazel nut,
of a pearly white, which tasted like sugar and water. That little
sweetness was enough to set us all digging the bulbs up with table
knives, but even little children can value things for their beauty as
well as taste. The _macachina_ was like the wood-sorrel in shape, both
flower and leaf, but the leaves were much smaller and grew close to
the ground, as the plant flourished most where the grass was close-
cropped by the sheep, forming a smooth turf like that of our chalk
downs. The flowers were never crowded together like the buttercup,
forming sheets of shining yellow, but grew two or three inches apart,
each slender stem producing a single flower, which stood a couple of
inches above the turf.
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