ncata_). It requires no encouragement other than shade, but grows too
rank in the summer heats and loses its wildwood grace. A common enough
orchid in these parts is the false lady's slipper (_Epipactis
gigantea_), one that springs up by any water where there is sufficient
growth of other sorts to give it countenance. It seems to thrive best in
an atmosphere of suffocation.

The middle Sierras fall off abruptly eastward toward the high valleys.
Peaks of the fourteen thousand class, belted with sombre swathes of
pine, rise almost directly from the bench lands with no foothill
approaches. At the lower edge of the bench or mesa the land falls away,
often by a fault, to the river hollows, and along the drop one looks for
springs or intermittent swampy swales. Here the plant world resembles a
little the lake gardens, modified by altitude and the use the town folk
put it to for pasture. Here are cress, blue violets, potentilla, and, in
the damp of the willow fence-rows, white false asphodels. I am sure we
make too free use of this word _false_ in naming plants--false mallow,
false lupine, and the like. The asphodel is at least no falsifier, but a
true lily by all the heaven-set marks, though small of flower and run
mostly to leaves, and should have a name that gives it credit for
growing up in such celestial semblance. Native to the mesa meadows is a
pale iris, gardens of it acres wide, that in the spring season of full
bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure wings. Single flowers are too
thin and sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full
fields have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand,
and quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal. A very
poet's flower, I thought; not fit for gathering up, and proving a
nuisance in the pastures, therefore needing to be the more loved. And
one day I caught Winnenap' drawing out from mid leaf a fine strong fibre
for making snares. The borders of the iris fields are pure gold, nearly
sessile buttercups and a creeping-stemmed composite of a redder hue. I
am convinced that English-speaking children will always have buttercups.
If they do not light upon the original companion of little frogs they
will take the next best and cherish it accordingly. I find five
unrelated species loved by that name, and as many more and as
inappropriately called cowslips.

By every mesa spring one may expect to find a single shrub of the
buckthorn, called of o