climes: the New England elm and a cork tree, a cedar of Lebanon and a
maple or an English oak. Then the glorious palm--twenty-two varieties in
Montecito Valley alone.

Sydney Smith said of the fertility of Australia, "Tickle her with a hoe
and she laughs with a harvest." But in California even the hoe is not
needed, for "volunteer crops" come up all by themselves, and look better
than ours so carefully cultivated. They say that if a Chinaman eats a
watermelon under a tree the result is a fine crop of melons next year.
And I read of a volunteer tomato plant ploughed down twice that measured
twelve feet square, and bore thousands of small red tomatoes.

Alfalfa is an ever-growing crop--can be garnered five times each year.

And as for flowers, I really cannot attempt to enumerate or describe in
detail. There are hundreds of varieties of roses. They were found
growing wild by myriads, and have been most carefully cultivated and
improved. One rose tree in the grounds of the Arlington Hotel has spread
over sixty feet of the veranda, and three lady guests have climbed into
its branches at once. As one man said: "The roses here would climb to
the moon if a trellis could be provided."

A friend sent me twenty-five large bunches of the choicest roses from
her garden one morning in April, each bunch a different variety. Their
roses are shipped in large quantities to San Francisco, and Chicago has
her churches decorated at Easter from the rose gardens of Santa Barbara.

Honey naturally is thought of. Apiculture here is a great business. The
bee has to be busy all day long and all through the year--no rest. One
ingenious fellow proposed crossing the working bee with the firefly, so
it could work all night long by its own lantern. But this is better. I
hear wondrous stories of bees getting into cracks of church towers or
upper stories, and bulging out the buildings with their accumulated
stores--positively cartloads of sweetness. Think of honey made from
orange flowers selling at five cents a pound!

A clergyman writing of Santa Barbara County says that twenty-five years
ago all their vegetables were imported. Now beans yield a ton to the
acre, potatoes two hundred and fifty bushels per acre, and he has seen
potatoes that weighed six, seven, and eight and a half pounds--as much
as an ordinary baby; beets, seventy-five tons to the acre; carrots,
thirty. Mr. Webster once declared in Congress that this State could
never raise a b