ts, some
of them almost impenetrable. The largest trunks are nearly a foot in
diameter. When in bloom it makes a fine show with its abundant clusters
of flowers, which are white and fragrant. The fruit is very small and
savagely acid. 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