Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade
of grass, yet out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken
boulders, a flower garden bloomed as at home in a conservatory.
Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all over our rough parlour,
choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones
from between two blocks of shattered mineral. Azaleas made a big
snow-bed just above the well. The shoulder of the hill waved white
with Mediterranean heath. In the crannies of the ledge and about
the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in
clusters. Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like
blossom. Close at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered,
delightful to the sight and smell. At sunrise, and again late at
night, the scent of the sweet bay trees filled the canyon, and the
down-blowing night wind must have borne it hundreds of feet into
the outer air.
All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The madrona was here
no bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub;
the very pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper
canyon, were not so tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the
most of them came lower than my waist. For a prosperous forest
tree, we must look below, where the glen was crowded with green
spires. But for flowers and ravishing perfume, we had none to
envy: our heap of road-metal was thick with bloom, like a hawthorn
in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the mountain, a
laboratory of poignant scents.
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