Page:Atlantis Arisen.djvu/250



lovely shapes and colors. I have found within the range of an acre forty kinds of flowering plants in the month of July, half of them of this minute size.

Of the plants peculiar to the Northwest which bear handsome flowers the Camas family is prominent. The Camasia esculenta , or edible camas, of whose roots the Indians make bread, grows about eighteen inches high, and bears at top a bunch of starshaped flowers, of a beautiful lavender color, with a golden centre. The leaves grow from the root, and are lanceolate. The places where they are most abundant usually are called “ Camas prairies,” and they form a feature of Eastern Oregon and Idaho. They are also plentiful in Western Oregon. The flowering season is about the middle of May near the Lower Columbia. There are several species of the camas, one of which is poisonous.

Only a very thorough and industrious botanist could enumerate the flowering plants native to this country. Among the most useful is the yellow lupine, which with the white, blue, and purple varieties grows abundantly in East Oregon. The yellow variety is found to be a power in reclaiming the sandy wastes where it is sown. The seed should be mixed with rye, which grows faster and protects the young plant from the encroachments of the sand ; but once the lupine is fairly above the ground it becomes aggressive, not only defending itself, but absorbing the life of the rye. In the autumn the lupine sheds its leaves, which form a pasty muck over the ground, while new ones start out; and this it does for five years, when it dies, having fulfilled its mission. The ground can now be sown with grass and harrowed, when the grass comes up richly, and the billowy sand waste is a verdant plain. It was by this means that the military reservation and G-olden Gate Park at San Francisco were reclaimed. The same method might be applied to making the sandy Union Pacific Railroad line along the upper Columbia more comfortable, as well us more agreeable to the eye.

The blue iris, familiar to all observers of the brook-side in spring, is not absent here; nor the purple larkspur; nor the musk-plant, Mimulus longiflorus; nor the Mimulus luteus; nor yet the buttercup, Ranunculus occidentalis. Violets blue and yellow embroider the verdant earth-mantle, and anemone detroidea shelters itself under every bush. Running over the ground in