UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES

The Wild Gardens
of Old California

The Author
Coming to Pasadena from Philadelphia some twenty years
ago and already a botanist of note, Charles Francis Saunders
found, in the natural beauty, romance and human interest of
the Pacific side of the continent, material ready to his hand.
It has been said of him that the subtle atmosphere and charm
that literature creates for a country he has helped to weave
about California and the Southwest by writings occupying a
field distinctively their own. He is the author of the follow-
ing books:

In a Poppy Garden (Verse)

California Wild Flowers (With Elisabeth HaUoiveU Saunders)

A Window in Arcady

The Indians of fhe Terraced Houses

Under the Sky in California

With the Flowers and Trees in California

The California Padres and Their Missions (With }. Smeaton Chase )
Finding the Worth -While in California
Western Flower Guide

Finding the Worth-While in the Southwest
Useful wild plants of the United States and Canada
The Southern Sierras of California
A Little Book of California Missions
Trees and Shrubs of California Gardens

The Mission Santa Barbara

FROM A PAINTING BY COLIN CAMPBELL COOPER

The Wild Gardens
of Old California

*A presentment of

PADRE JUAN CRESPI AND HOW
HE WENT ON A JOURNEY; OF
DAVID DOUGLAS, THE SCOT,
AND HOW HE INTRODUCED
THE WILD FLOWERS OF OLD
CALIFORNIA INTO ENGLAND

and

SEEDS OF HOPE FOR THE DIM
AND DISTANT FUTURE

BY CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS
ILLUSTRATED WITH ETCHINGS BY
EDWARD BOREIN

FOREWORD
BY

RALPH HOFFMANN

PUBLISHED AT SANTA BARBARA
BY WALLACE HEBBERD, MCMXXVII

Copyrighted 1927 by
Wallace J. Hebberd

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF ALBERT R. VALENTIEN

392842

Foreword

I believe only a few enthusiastic naturalists would
be transported willingly in the flesh, to the California of 1770,
and accompany the Mission fathers in their long journeys
from San Diego to Carmel. The opportunity to see Calif ornia
in the unspoiled beauty of primitive nature would be offset,
for most of us, by the inconvenience of primitive life. Charles
Francis Saunders, in this charming book, takes us in spirit to
the California of that early period, and introduces us to Padre
Juan Crespi, a beloved associate of Padre Junipero Serra, who
accompanied the first expedition that blazed El Camino Real,
the highway that we now hurry along on our own, and not,
like the padres, on Our Father's business.

Padre Crespi, loved the works of God then, as Mr. Saunders
loves them now. The missionary priest noted in his journal
many of the bright-hued flowers, which, in that spring, as
they do today, lent a fleeting glory to the hills and valleys. The
beauties of flower and bird, the glories of valley and mountain,
did not escape his scientific yet reverent eye. He was, per-
haps, better versed in theology than he was in botany, and his
record of what he saw is incomplete and obscure at times, but
Mr. Saunders, with the knowledge which later students of our
flora have acquired, points out to us, as we in fancy accom-
pany the observing monk, the striking floral features that he
must have seen. Probably few who now hurry along the
highways know the flowers any better than did Crespi; that
they pay them much less heed, is certain.

Mr. Saunders has told his story with a keen understanding
of the childlike nature which the Padre, the Indians who wel-
comed him, and the flowers which delighted him, all share. A
certain quaintness of expression in his style helps admirably
to summon back the age that he is depicting. Above all,
no one can read this account without feeling the warmth of
his love for the beauty of unspoiled nature, and without shar-
ing in his desire to save what is still left of it from the ever-
increasing encroachments of modern civilization. The book
contains, also, a very practical means by which we can aid in
restoring a bit, at least, of the beauty and glory that met the
eyes of Padre Crespi in the spring of the year 1770.

Ralph Hoffmann.

Carpinteria, California.
December, 1926.

The Wild Gardens
of Old California

Of Padre Fray Juan Crespi, and
How He Went on a
Journey

I

(

OF PADRE FRAY JUAN CRESPI, AND
HOW HE WENT ON A
JOURNEY

A T the Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo,
near Monterey, there lived, a century and a half ago, a kindly
Franciscan friar, Juan Crespi by name. He was, like several
of the early Californian missionaries of his order, including
the chief of them all, Padre Fray Junipero Serra, a Mallorcan
by birth, and he had reached California from Mexico with
that Portola expedition which was to clinch Spain's claim to
her long neglected province. Of all the devoted brotherhood
who were comrades of Padre Junipero, none, they say, was so
dear to him as this Padre Juan, so sunny natured, so humble
and warm of heart, so altogether simpdtico, that he was affec-
tionately known among his companions as el beato, or, as we
should say, The Blessed. To his Indians he was little less than
a saint — nay, something more than a saint, so quickly respon-
sive was he to their needs and so understanding of their
weaknesses.

Loving God, Padre Juan naturally enough loved all His

1

works, both great and small, and in the records he has left us,
his lively enjoyment of the scenes that met his eyes in that
early California, which was still a virgin land — scenes no white
man had ever before looked upon — finds hearty expression. In
those days, people traveled leisurely and saw correspondingly
much; for the Brothers Minor of Saint Francis, even though
they did not always do their California journeyings afoot, as
our fancy is disposed to picture them, did them hardly
more expeditiously when they went a-muleback. Crespi, you
must know, accompanied Portola on his famous marches up
and down the coast between San Diego and the north, seek-
ing the lost port of Monterey, which Don Sebastian Vizcaino
had discovered over a century and a half before, and which
Spain had at last realized she must occupy or lose all Alta
California; and Crespi's diary shares with the notes of the
engineer, Don Miguel Costanso, the distinction of being the
first recorded impressions of white travelers in what we are
now pleased to call the Golden State.

You do not read far in Padre Juan's lively journals before
you find that he has an eye for flowers and for all other grow-
ing things. He is, to be sure, no botanist, and he makes short
shrift, at times, of several diverse sorts, I suspect, under gen-
eral terms not so easy to untangle. Yet even had he had train-
ing in Old "World botany, it would have booted him little on
this wild Hesperian coast, where nearly every plant in 1769
was as innocent of name as Adam found the flowers of Eden.
He gossips artlessly of salvia and romero — sage and rosemary,
as we may say — in many an entry; hierbas olorosas, fragrant
herbs, daily trampled by the passing cavalcade, yield up a
thousand undistinguished perfumes; fringing streams and
afloat on the bosom of still springs, (how endearing is the

2

Spanish term for these bubbling fountains — ojos de agua,
that is, eyes of water!) water cresses abound, and are greeted
with enthusiasm, though less, I take it, for the charm of their
sparkling white blossoms than for the crisp, peppery leaves
and stems, that give a spicy tang to a sadly monotonous diet.
That shambling Caliban of plants, the flat-jointed cactus or
nopal, drops from the wayside its crabbed gift of crimson
"pears," bristly and seedy, but luscious, once you learn the
secret of handling them. In damp arroyos a myriad grape-
vines clamber high into the dappled sycamores and great
alders, and drape the branches with clusters of purpling
fruit. A fair land, indeed, is this to these sufferers from a
scurvy-breeding sea voyage, or from the stabs and thirsts of
a cruel jornada over the Lower California desert. Padre Juan
is an artist in simple delineation. "We arrived this day," he
says of a certain date, "in a very beautiful valley or Canada,
on seeing which it appeared not otherwise than a cultivated
or sown field, because of its much verdure; and on a little
eminence in the said valley we saw a village of Gentiles with
its little houses of grass, who, on seeing us, all sallied out to
the road, happily and with demonstrations of rejoicing. We
descended into this valley and saw that its verdure was of
wild gourds, very leafy, and many wild rose bushes."

Above all else do these communities of the wild rose, which
the travelers encounter continually, stir the fancy, awaken-
ing sweet memories of Spain and home, for wild roses are wild
roses the world round, and all the world loves them. One day,
Padre Juan breaks off a spray upon which he counts six blos-
soms, full blown, and a round dozen in the bud, and the dis-
covery goes into his journal with as much care and circum-
stantiality as though it were the elusive port of Monterey

3

itself that had been found. Rosas de Castilla, he calls them —
roses of Castile; and I think he would like to know that his
name for them has not died out in this land he loved so well.
Only a few years ago, I heard a Mission Indian in San Diego
County call wild roses so. It was like the echo of an old music.

Can we today, I wonder, fill in the gaps in Padre Crespi's
journals and picture to our fancy somewhat of the flowery
scenes that cheered him as he helped blaze El Camino Real
between San Diego and San Francisco bay, and as later he trod
the trails and byways about the Mission on the River Carmelo,
which from 1771 remained his home until eleven years later
he left it for a heavenly? I think we can in a measure, for
California is still young, and in spite of the era of floral de-
spoliation begun by cattle barons and sheep men, intensified
by the ploughs of the small-ranch folk, and brought to a
dreadful climax in these last days by boulevard makers and
misguided sub-dividers — in spite of all this, there is left in
places enough of the primitive flora upon which to build
some conception of those early wild gardens.

Let us, then, turn back the calendar and set it at mid-spring
in the year of grace 1770. Padre Junipero, in the face of the
malevolent arts of the arch plotter Satan, has started his first
Mission, dedicated to San Diego de Alcala; and now the
second must be established at Monterey. So, while he sails
north to the business by the ship that carries the stores and
ecclesiastical furniture, let us accompany Juan Crespi with
the land contingent of the expedition. We shall be taking
between five and six weeks to the hundred and eighty Spanish
leagues of travel, so that with due allowance for godly stops
on high days and holy days there is leisure for some floral dal-
liance as we go.

4

Of the Flowers Padre Juan Saw
as He Journeyed, and Certain
Other Sights

II

OF THE FLOWERS PADRE JUAN SAW
AS HE JOURNEYED, AND CERTAIN
OTHER SIGHTS

J.HE rains are over and gone, and the face of Nature
shines benignantly. The air is musical with bird song and
trilling — the haunting melancholy of the wild dove's long-
drawn lament and the liquid notes of the meadow lark, a bird
that Saint Francis, had he known her, must have loved as he
loved that Sister Lark of Umbria whose hood, he tells us, is
"like the religious, and when she soars she praises God most
sweetly." On mesa and valley floor and treeless loma, the
mantle of vivid green is overlaid riotously with color — the
^orange of California poppies; the blue and lavender of sturdy
lupines and lolling wild heliotrope; the mauve of owl's clover;
the pale gold of sun-cups — trickles and rivulets and broad
rivers of color. Down from the foothills of the purple Coast
Range, it leaps and streams, gathered now into pools and
lakes, now breaking in cascades and ribbons over the brink of
the arroyos and barrancas, to reappear on the hither side and
spread illimitably in kaleidoscopic flood, until it is halted at
last by the barrier of the sea.

7

In this tempest of color there are quieter notes, too. Nest-
ling amid the grasses are colonies of wild cyclamen with mod-
est, downcast faces and ears flattened back, and with them,
those most endearing of wildings, the yellow pansies. Their
golden petals are dashed with brown and penciled with purple,
each blossom jauntily perched upon a slender watch tower of
a stalk, whence it looks about its small world in childlike faith
and innocence; and snuggling close upon the breast of Mother
Earth is many another little flower, content in quietude and
lowliness — dainty nemophilas of a heavenly blue; fringed
gilias yellow throated and pink; pallid creamcups and collin-
sias lifting pagoda-like spires in purple and lilac and white.
More aloof are the mariposa tulips, which, like the aristocrats
that they are, shrink from the touch of other elbows. They
lift cups of varied color here and there among the taller
grasses, upon which, as upon an emerald sea, billowed and
tossed by the breeze, the lovely flowers ride and dance like
cockle shell boats tugging at their anchors.

Our route follows with more or less digression the line of
California's El Camino Real, the King's Highway that is to
be; and many of our camping places are the sites of future
Missions. On our third day from San Diego, or maybe the
fourth, we are in the spacious valley in whose midst Mission
San Luis Rey de Francia will some day lift its regal tower
under Padre Peyri's benevolent sway, though it will not be
for many a year after Padre Juan's earthly day is done.
Another camp is beside the sea, where a little river comes sing-
ing from an aliso-bordered canyon to lose itself in the sea; and
dimly in the west, there are, dreaming in the haze, two low
islands which we believe to be Santa Catalina and San Cle-
mente, both of Viscaino's naming, long ago. A mile or two

8

up the pretty canyon they will some day be founding a Mis-
sion to San Juan Capistrano.

Sometimes we traverse sunny vegas, or fertile plains, fright-
ening ahead of us bands of antelope, sending hares and rabbits
scurrying from their forms, and owls and squirrels into their
burrows. Often these plains are close-carpeted with yellow
baeria, as with cloth of gold. This is the sociable little plant
that some day will be called "gold fields" — a lowly, stubborn
indigene by no means disposed to be bullied out of its primi-
tive rights in California soil, to which, in the teeth of genera-
tions of cattle, cultivation and intruder weeds, it seems deter-
mined to cling tenaciously to the end of time. It spreads, a
cheerful rug of sunny color, far eastward to the foothills,
where it is met by the buff and salmon of the shrubby
monkey flowers. There, too, against a dark background of
spiny leaves the clustered stars of the prickly phlox glow
rosily, fellowshiping with Indian paint-brush and scarlet
bugler. Where the slopes are open and damp, there grows a
surprising and entrancing flower, the brown fritillary or, if
you will, the chocolate lily. The flowers swing from a foot-
high stalk, and seem like a voiceless chime of dusky bells in a
floral campanario. Perhaps, in paradise, it will please Padre
.Juan to know that in the gringo years to come, little children
will be calling these dark hued blossoms by a term, "Mission
bells," that links them, in name at least, with the Mission
adventure.

Picking our way ever northward in Portola's footsteps of a
year ago, up and down and around bald lomas and through
canadas "populated," as the quaint Spanish has it, with wil-
lows and sycamores and oaks, with abundance of roses of
Castile and flowers innumerable, we skirt the noble valley that

9

will be the site of another Mission, that of San Gabriel Arc-
angel; and shortly we are fording el Rio de Nuestra Senora
de los Angeles de Porciuncula — ambitious baptismal name, in
which it is safe to say Padre Juan had a hand, of the unpre-
tentious stream destined to cleanse the linen and irrigate the
vines of the unborn pueblo of Los Angeles. Following its
willowy marge up through the hills, sprinkled with live oaks
and wild walnut trees, we emerge by and by into the broad
vale of Santa Catalina de Bononia of the Live Oaks, populous
with gentilism, where in a few years Padre "Napoleon's" Mis-
sion San Fernando Rey de Espana will swallow up the valley's
ancient and statelier name.

Of all the colors with which the valleys and mesas greet us,
none is so prevailing as yellow. Wherever the eyes rest, there
it flashes up, the residual light of uncounted revolving suns. It
is the hue that distinguishes a host of composites, and com-
posites are everywhere abounding, not waiting as so many of
their kindred do in the East, until autumn, but eagerly enlist-
ing in the California spring pageant. Padre Juan gives them
no name — how can he? — but they will be known in time as
encelias, senecios, layias, coreopsis, eriophyllum, chaenactis,
helianthus, the petite baeria that ravished us a while back, to
say nothing of many another. One golden beauty, which in
coming years will make glorious thickets nearly twice a man's
height and incidentally play a pretty role in one of California's
most famous romances not far from San Fernando — this
golden flower we look for in vain in the primitive landscape,
the wild mustard; for it is not California born, but an immi-
grant. Padre Juan, you may be sure, knew it well in Spain
and could tell you of the toothsomeness of its young leaves in
an olla. He will have it, beyond doubt, in his kitchen garden

10

at San Carlos. Indeed, he may even now have some seeds of it
up his capacious sleeve and will be slyly dropping them as we
go; for among the most tenaciously held traditions of Spanish
Californians in another generation or two will be one to the
effect that in the first days when the Padres set out from one
Mission to walk to another, they sowed the seeds of this mos-
taza negra as they went, in order that the flowers thus estab-
lished by the dim trail might make it easier for those who
came after to follow.

Out of this valley we scramble and chop our way through
chaparral and tumbled masses of strange element-sculptured
rocks, and so down into the valley of the Rio Santa Clara, all
starred and spangled with a myriad of bee-haunted flowers
now growing familiar to our eyes, — gilias and suncups and
poppies, paint brush and owl's clover, lupines and mimulus,
pincushion flowers and tidy tips and thistle poppies, clarkias
and blazing stars, and now another that betokens the waning
spring, the fair godetia. By such flowery ways we descend to
meet the sea again, and find flourishing villages of wide-awake,
sea-faring, fish-catching aboriginals living in thatched huts,
in shape like half an orange. The abundance of these comely
folk in a region of evident fertility makes a Mission as good as
- foreordained, and it shall be called for the Seraphic Doctor
San Buenaventura, all in good time.

Of course, we have been meeting Indians all along, very
affable and gentle ones as a rule, the women honestly clad in
short skirts to the knees, and mantelets of rabbit skins about
the shoulders, but the men as unclothed as Adam before the
fall, wearing their garment of nature as unblushingly as
though it were of the richest fruit of the loom. At every vil-
lage Padre Juan's eyes glisten with evangelistic fervor at the

11

thought of the rapidly approaching hour when he will be
settled at last in his own dear Mission, thrusting the gospel
sickle deep into the waiting harvest of souls. Meantime he
finds a healthy interest in the material harvest of acorns,
pine-nuts, wild seeds, and what-not, which, in simple friend-
liness and out of their poverty, the poor people offer in
heaped up bateas and coritas to the queer strangers, and for
which they are requited with gifts of glass beads, and now
and then a ribbon or two. We may not always guess the
flowers to which such offerings pertain; but of some we do
learn. Certain little nut-like tubers, crisp and palatable, we
find to be the corms of the wild hyacinth, or brodiaea —
cacomita, as we might say in Spanish — whose pretty, blue
clusters of flowers topping tall, slender stems, have been a
common sight all along our way. Of the seeds none is so
cherished as those of the wild chia, though so small indi-
vidually that one marvels at the aboriginal genius who first
saw a meal in them. They are mucilaginous and of a pleas-
ant, nutty flavor, which is improved by parching. The
Gentile way of doing this is to toss the seeds deftly about on a
basket tray mingled with hot pebbles, or bits of ember, fresh
plucked from the fire. A charming little flower is this chia, to
which Padre Juan does not hesitate to give this Spanish name,
because of a resemblance to a flower he knew in Spain. The
tiny blue blossoms, compact in prickly heads, rise in tiers one
above another, with the stem piercing them as though it were
a skewer. The bland, oily seeds are soothing to fevered throats
and ailing stomachs, so the Indians have discovered, and I
think Padre Juan, who is ever zealous to add to his skill as
soul's physician, a skill in bodily ills, is making a mental note
of chia for his medicine chest. At any rate, the future will

12

tell of many a doctoring Padre making it serve like flaxseed
for soothing teas and healing poultices. Another of the Gen-
tile offerings that interests the good Padre is a sort of honey-
comb, which we find is made of a kind of dew that exudes
from the stems of the carrizo reed and is very sweet and tasty.

We are now upon the beach, that goes westering for many a
league. In the mists, far off shore, are islands, and the sea is
what Vizcaino called the canal, that is, channel, of Santa
Barbara, because as he sailed it Saint Barbara's feast day fell.
Following this beach amid a prodigality of yellow primroses
and pink sand verbenas, glittering ice-plant and blushing
posies of plump fig-marigolds, the seething surf on one side
licking at our heels, and on the other the sage-clad sierra all
but crowding us into the water, we come, on a day in May,
upon a considerable lagoon which Padre Juan remembers as
La Laguna de la Concepcion, for it was either he or Padre
Gomez who named it a year ago. Here, in seemly fashion, the
sierra withdraws a while inland and leaves a broad setting for
a Mission, particularly as there is a waiting harvest of Indians
all about; and it will, in truth, be for Santa Barbara Virgen y
Martir, a very famous Mission, as time and history will tell.

Still hugging the coast, now wrapped in fog, now bathed in
sunshine, we reach, after many leagues, and pass around it, the
wind-swept Punta de la Concepcion, also of Vizcaino's nam-
ing, and by and by cross at its mouth the Santa Ines River,
though Padre Juan calls it not that, but Rio de Santa Rosa.
Upon its banks, but well inland, two Missions will, in due
time, be founded; the one dedicated to Santa Ines, the mar-
tyred virgin Saint Agnes whose Eve a young English poet will
soon be singing in immortal verse; the other to La Purisima
Concepcion "of the holy Virgin Mary, mother of God and

13

our Lady," of all the California Missions the one to suffer
most ruinously in the terrible "Year of the Earthquakes,"
1812. A few days more and we turn into a canyon at whose
farther end we come out into a broad pocket among great
mountains, where San Luis, Bishop of Tolosa, is one day to
have his Mission, founded in rare prospect of spiritual spoil,
for the region is peopled "to the four winds with much
gentilism."

Here we are confronted with the wild Sierra de Santa Lucia,
crested with frowning forest and gashed and seamed all about
with many a precipitous canyon and bouldery, torrent-swept
barranca. The western base pitches straight into the sea, leav-
ing no foot-hold for travelers, so there is nothing for it but to
pull tight the cinch and climb. A year ago poor Padre Juan
and his comrades, with aching bones and thumping hearts,
inched their way through the rough midst of it, the credo in
their mouths; but this time we have the advantage of that
brave pioneering, and go forward stout-heartedly, our way
brightened in the May weather with the stately beauty of the
buckeye's snowy thyrses and the billowy bloom of chamiso
and mountain lilac, blue and white. So we come, one day, into
the peaceful solitude, all sunlit, verdant and wild -flowery,
where Mission San Antonio de Padua will be set, as soon as San
Carlos has his Mission at Monterey; thence by rugged and
devious ways we thread more wilderness, to descend at last,
without mishap, through blossoming chaparral into a wide
plain perfumed with wild rose, and sage, and rosemary, which
Padre Juan calls San Elizario, though the maps of the future
will have it Salinas. Somewhere not far from where we pass
there is to be a Mission to "Our Most Sorrowful Lady of Soli-
tude," which future generations will know as La Soledad, and

14

here Papa Arillaga, twice Governor of Spanish California,
will come to be rid of the turmoil of a troublesome world and
its politics, and "clothed in a habit which the religious of our
Father Francis wear," will lay down his wearied mortality to
rest, against the Last Day.

And now it is a straight course and a lightsome one, ever
broadening and ever flowery, down to the sea and "the fam-
ous port of Monterey," girt about with pines tall, and
straight, and innumerable, fit for a king's navy, just as Viz-
caino had declared. Rippling and billowing to the surf's edge
are white dunes decked gloriously with primroses, beach asters
and rosy wild buckwheat, lupines and mock heather, and
sweet smelling sand verbenas, yellow and pink. And past
yonder point, where patriarchal cypresses with moss green
tops blown flat and smooth as tables, defy the insistent temp-
ests, are more dunes and a vega very fair to look upon, "suit-
able for corn fields and abounding with willows and other
trees, wild black berries and infinitude of wild roses." Down
its tranquil midst a little river winds, which we recognize as
the River Carmelo in the valley of that name — of Vizcaino's
bestowing, out of consideration for the three discalced Car-
melites who accompanied him.

I confess this charming valley of Carmel takes on for me an
added grace, when I recall it as the abode for so many years of
Juan Crespi, and picture him, sometimes alone, sometimes
with his beloved Junipero, walking its sunny slopes, gathering
roses of Castile, learning pagan dialects and teaching Spanish,
making adobes and helping with the barley mush, praying
and baptizing, marrying and burying, always hammering
away hopefully at aboriginal heads and hearts, to instil into
them some notion of the divine providence and compassion.

15

You may wonder, if once in a while, tired nature would not
cry out for a change from this exacting round. Perhaps it
did; at any rate, I can imagine how complaisantly Padre Juan
would embrace a call of ecclesiastical business that would
take him through the flowery countryside to some Gentile
rancheria where need abode, or, perhaps, to pay a visit to
Padre Buenaventura Sit jar in his whitewashed Mission San
Antonio, a bright jewel in its setting of emerald hills. One
glorious outing his diaries tell of, taken with Don Pedro Fages
and a few soldiers, seeking a site for a Mission to Saint Francis.
Let us go with them.

Making a great sweep to the eastward of San Carlos, across
the vale of San Elizario and over the jagged crest of the Gavi-
lans, down into the valley where San Juan Bautista is later
given a Mission, and north and east again, a height is attained
whence a view is had of a great valley, the like of which can-
not be found in all New Spain. O rare and heavenly sight!
It is the month of March, and north and south and eastward
as far as the eye reaches, is a scene that may not be described
but only imagined, and fear not that the imagination will
outrun the fact. It is a sea reaching to the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada, a sea of wild bloom with a tree-lined river and
its tributaries in the midst, and the valley is what we now
know as the San Joaquin with its northern prolongation, the
Sacramento; but Crespi called it the valley of the River of
San Francisco. Mile follows mile of blue and pink and white,
of purple and gold, of cream and red and orange, and pale
lavender — a natural garden of lupines waist high and
shoulder high, of poppies, amsinckias, larkspur, gilias and
popcorn flowers, nemophilas, Indian paint-brush and mea-
dow-foam, owl's clover, penstemons, primroses, phacelias,

16

mints of a score of kinds — one is breathless before the enu-
meration is half over. It is, as one has said who knew it while it
was still unspoiled, "one sweet bee-garden." And then, as the
pageant pales and dies before the breath of summer, there
comes another burst of color, the sheeted gold of sunflowers
and tarweeds, spread illirnitably.

Of another sort was the country, also traveled by Crespi,
due northward from Monterey, where lay the nearest neigh-
bors in that direction, Missions Santa Clara and San Francisco,
a region of rare beauty, too, when the year is at its prime.
Through sun-shot, fog-fed forests of magnificent conifers
the trail runs, the dim aisles lighted up with a myriad blessed
flowers — wood sorrel, baneberry, columbine, violets, iris, the
shy redwood rose, and the goblin faces of the adder's tongue.
Sword ferns gush up in stately fountains of verdure about the
huge boles of the trees, mingling with the glistening ever-
green of the red-stemmed huckleberry. You may be sure that
Padre Juan does not fail to record these noble trees; and as
nobody knows their proper name, one is invented for them
by the Padre or his Spanish companions, from the color of the
wood, polo Colorado , that is, redwood, and to this day no bet-
ter has been found. Nor does he overlook that slender aristo-
crat of the Coast forests of Central California, the exquisite
madrono, a name Padre Juan borrows from Spain, because of
its resemblance to the European strawberry tree so named.
"It is," he admits, "of smaller fruit than the Spanish, but
indeed of the same sort."

Clear of the redwoods, the trail enters a different land, a
land of glorious live oaks, the ground swept by their branches,
which parting with the hands, one enters, as into a vast, leafy
room. These monarchs dot the plains for miles upon miles.

17

Deer graze on the abounding grasses or delicately drink at
the shining streams, and on every side, through the trees, is the
purple sweep of misty mountains lifted against a sapphire sky.
I am sure Padre Juan fares blithely through such idyllic scenes,
occupied a century later by many a town and many a palace,
the while he praises God and finds his strength renewed and
his wits sharpened for another bout with Satan and his doings.

It was returning from such a journey to the Mission of San
Francisco, but in the autumn of the year, that Padre Juan felt
a mortal sickness coming upon him, and shortly after reach-
ing his little hut at the Mission that had so long been home to
him, he took to his pallet, not to rise again. And there came
Sister Death and bore him within the veil. His dust reposes
beside Serra's before the altar of the ancient Mission on the
Carmelo which was the child of their love, and where, as long
as its walls stand, he will not be forgotten.

18

Of David Douglas, the Scot, and How He
Introduced the Wild Flowers of
Old California into England

Ill

OF DAVID DOUGLAS, THE SCOT, AND HOW HE
INTRODUCED THE WILD FLOWERS OF
OLD CALIFORNIA INTO ENGLAND

e years move on. Mission after Mission is
founded, like links in a lengthening chain, until it is possible
for a leisurely horseman, traveling from San Diego to San
Francisco, to spend every night of the journey as a guest of the
Lesser Brothers of Saint Francis; in the morning hear mass
and be comfortably sped upon his way, with a pax vobhcum
upon his head, a plump luncheon in his wallet, and never a
copper to pay. The thatched and wattled first structures,
hurriedly put up for instant use, have been gradually
replaced by substantial edifices of adobe or of sculptured
stone, consuming years of patient labor in the building; of an
architecture reminiscent of old Spain and of a dignity
worthier of a cause devoted to God's glory and the spread of
His kingdom. Valleys and mesas and a thousand hills are
dotted with herds and flocks guarded and cared for by the
mansos of the Padres. Where once were only brambles and
the lean fruits of the wilderness, are flourishing vineyards and
olive yards, orchards of pear and peach, fig and orange,

21

decently hedged about with cactus and pomegranate; while
in quiet patios within the Mission walls, shut away from the
world's intrusions, are pleasant garden spots where the exiled
Padres in their moments of loneliness, which, you may be
sure, are many, take solace of flowers that speak to them in
the language of their old homeland of Spain — Castilian roses
and lilies of Mary, gillyflowers and pinks, oleanders and that
best beloved plant of Spanish California, Saint Joseph's staff,
or as we say, hollyhock.

Spain grows moribund. All sorts of heresies are in the air,
and the old order suffers change. Throughout Hispanic
America leaders "who knew not Joseph" are seizing the reins
of government, and one after another Spain's New World
provinces slip from her. California becomes an outpost of
Mexico, and Mexican politicians are not for Saint Francis. So
the Missions are marked for secularization and their star sinks
to its setting. The non-Spanish world, long shut out, or but
grudgingly tolerated for limited periods, begins to break
through the weakened barriers, and to push its claims in this
flowery corner of God's footstool. Toward the last of the year
1830, three days before Christmas, there lands at Monterey
one David Douglas, a Scotch botanist and collector of plants
for the Royal Horticultural Society of London, come on a
quest for seeds and specimens of California's wild flowers, the
fame of whose novel beauty has begun to be much talked of
in Europe.

Midwinter as it is, according to the almanacs of men,
Douglas finds that in Nature's calendar the spring is already
well under way. In thickets and arroyos near the little adobe
pueblo, the crimson splendor of the fuchsia-flowered goose-
berry entrances him; no coddled fuchsia of the greenhouse,

22

he thinks, could be more beautiful; lupines and larkspurs,
shoulder high, throng him in the damp canadas; and in sunny-
swales the exquisite nemophila that we call baby-blue-eyes,
and which Douglas writes down as "the harbinger of the
California spring," spreads rugs of tenderest azure on the
ground, just as it did in Padre Crespi's time. Every day yields
unsuspected spoil; no miser among his money bags ever had a
tithe of the joy that this beauty-loving young Scot has in the
floral riches that nature lavishes about him, whose seed he
garners and sends home to England.

Douglas spent nearly two years in California, principally in
the region between San Francisco and Santa Barbara, and to
him is to be credited the introduction into the gardens of
Europe of a host of delightful California wild flowers cher-
ished there as we Americans in our gardens cherish our exotics.
The California poppy, for instance, has been cultivated
abroad for nearly a century, and while it owes its name Esch-
scholtzia to an earlier visitor than Douglas, it was Douglas
who gave it to the gardening world. Gilia, phacelia, collinsia,
nemophila, mimulus, clarkia, godetia, lupine, cream-cups,
blazing star, meadow-foam, ribes, penstemon, brodiasa, mari-
posa-tulip, camassia, erythronium, fritillaria — such, in many
species, are Douglas' legacies to the gardens of the world, and
in many cases these have developed under cultivation garden
varieties of unusual beauty and range of color. Having thus
set the fashion, Douglas was followed by other foreign col-
lectors, as Hartweg, Lobb and John Jeffrey; and it is not too
much to say that for two or three generations California's
marvelous native flowers were better known abroad than at
home.

Meantime what had California been doing with these same
23

(92842

wild flowers? Ploughing them up, grazing them up, burning
them up, burying them under concrete and asphalt, tearing
them out by the roots to gratify a passing whim and then cast
aside; until, like her Indians, her wild flora has been desolated
and largely driven away from the homes of the people to find
refuge too often only in deserts and mountain fastnesses. But
while there are seeds there is hope; land is still plentiful enough
for a bit of garden with every house; and all who will may yet
have at their own doors a little Wild Garden of California.
Turn the page and take the hint.

24

University of California Library
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