Here you find mats of the
curious dwarf willow scarce an inch high, yet sending up a multitude of
gray silky catkins, illumined here and there with, the purple cups and
bells of bryanthus and vaccinium.
Go where you may, you everywhere find the lawn divinely beautiful, as if
Nature had fingered and adjusted every plant this very day. The floating
grass panicles are scarcely felt in brushing through their midst, so
flue are they, and none of the flowers have tall or rigid stalks. In the
brightest places you find three species of gentians with different
shades of blue, daisies pure as the sky, silky leaved ivesias with warm
yellow flowers, several species of orthocarpus with blunt, bossy spikes,
red and purple and yellow; the alpine goldenrod, pentstemon, and clover,
fragrant and honeyful, with their colors massed and blended. Parting the
grasses and looking more closely you may trace the branching of their
shining stems, and note the marvelous beauty of their mist of flowers,
the glumes and pales exquisitely penciled, the yellow dangling stamens,
and feathery pistils. Beneath the lowest leaves you discover a fairy
realm of mosses,--hypnum, dicranum, polytriclium, and many
others,--their precious spore-cups poised daintily on polished shafts,
curiously hooded, or open, showing the richly ornate peristomas worn
like royal crowns.
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