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94 Our California Sierra is five hundred miles long and seventy miles wide. The elevation is from 6,000 to nearly 15,000 feet. No great mountain range is more easy of access or better adapted to outdoor life. John Muir calls it not the Snowy Range, but the Range of Light, so marvelous are its sunbursts of morning, its clear noonday radiance from glacier-polished rocks and gleaming snows, its golden rivers of sunset, its alpine moonlights and starlights, its glories of blossoms of every hue, but chiefly white, blue, scarlet, golden, and all sorts of clear, vivid colors. Wonderful are the peaceful mountain lakelets that find places on no maps—pellucid , transparent, hidden in sheltered hollows of glacial valley-basins, at the lips of ancient moraines, or strung like beads on mountain streams, as in Lake Hollow in Tolumne Cañon, where ten such lakes lie close together. These snow-fed pools begin to throw off the chains of winter in May, June or July, according to the altitude, and then their margins suddenly run riot with a most bewildering variety and multitude of plants. Thousands of attractive lakelets exist in the Sierras; in the Merced district alone, Muir notes 131 of not less than five hundred yards in circuit; other thousands of hollows, once occupied by lakes, have now become green and blossoming meadows, while some are in the transition state—cold swamps where the Droseras grow, and one may look for Darlingtonia, or find in deeper channels the Nuphar polysepalum. The margins of these countless lakelets are soft with Mosses, pale green Hypnums, silky and lustrous Dicranums, dark Polytrichums and other Musci; green and purple Sphagnums, slender, flat-branched Selaginellas , and a multitude of as delicate plantcarpetings . In such wet places rise the tall stems and graceful white perianths of Spiranthes romanzoffiana, the Sierra Ladies’ Tresses, with white and greenish Habenarias . Sometimes one finds the whiteracemed Hastingsia, Sagittaria variabilis, or the Damasonium californicum of Torrey, chaRLes h. shiNN the Wild Gardens of the sierra (1896) From Garden and Forest, August 26, 1896, 343–44. thE Wild GaRdEns of thE siERRa 95 with many species of Juncus in the water edges. In a few cases, the ripe, salmoncolored capsules of the Bog Asphodel, Narthecium, gleam over the lesser water plants; and along the moister levels, whole acres of tall Veratrums, or False Hellebore, uplift their broad leaves and heavy spikes of dull cream-colored and greenish flowers. Mingled with the Rushes are bright green Quillworts, Isoetes, and the cordate-leaved Caltha leptosepala. Every inch of ground is occupied with overflowing plant-life. Bright-hued Mountain Grasses, Stipas, Festucas, Trisetums, Bromi, Calamagrostes and many more give soft hues of brown, purple and gold as they bloom and ripen on the sunny slopes or beside the blue lakelets. Beetles, ants, dragonflies, Vanessas, Papilios and many other species of butterflies in busy armies crawl and flutter through the warm summer land; mountain quail and grouse are in the thickets of dwarf Pines, Oaks, Poplars and Willows. Robins, swallows , grosbeaks and goldfinches are nesting or singing in tree-tops by rushing rivers and waterfalls; while the water ousel, swift bird-wonder, flashes through the spray, and the saucy Douglas squirrel, Sciurus douglasi , makes a lively part of every scene. But I have hardly begun to describe the variety of plant-life upon the shores of the lakelets in the alpine meadows and on the descending rock slopes. Around such lakes are vivid golden Ranunculi in many shades, Ranunculus andersonii, R. oxynotus, R. alismaefolius and others; purple -beaked Dodecatheons, dwarf Mimuli, yellow or pink, with crimson-spotted or copper-red hoods; bee-haunted Limnanthes , white and pale yellow; rose-tinted Claytonias; tall, fragrant Trifoliums, red, white or purple-flowered, massed by dripping springs against still statelier Aralias, Ferulas and Heracleums, or grouped with white and yellow Hosackias by the edges of splintered granite rocks, while underfoot are nodding Pearlworts, modest little Stellarias and Cerastiums and the waterloving Lobelia carnosula. Creeping Violas, white, yellow and blue, are blossoming by thousands in the warm half-shade; under the trees one may at rare times find the delicate Anemone multifida; the Aconitum fischeri lifts its pale blue flowers and pubescent stems through acres of orangeyellow and red-spotted Lilies, L. pardalinum , and near it is the pale lilac of Clarkia rhomboidea. By some of these alpine lakes the dwarf Willows are mingled with purple -flowering Kalmias, fringes of Cassiope and fragrant Vacciniums, Symphoricarpi and Loniceras...

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