Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castilleias, and
innumerable compositae were so crowded together that, had ninety-nine
per cent. of them been taken away, the plain would still have seemed to
any but Californians extravagantly flowery. The radiant, honeyful
corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed
in the living light like a sunset sky--one sheet of purple and gold,
with the bright Sacramento pouring through the midst of it from the
north, the San Joaquin from the south, and their many tributaries
sweeping in at right angles from the mountains, dividing the plain into
sections fringed with trees.
Along the rivers there is a strip of bottom-land, countersunk beneath
the general level, and wider toward the foot-hills, where magnificent
oaks, from three to eight feet in diameter, cast grateful masses of
shade over the open, prairie-like levels. And close along the water's
edge there was a fine jungle of tropical luxuriance, composed of
wild-rose and bramble bushes and a great variety of climbing vines,
wreathing and interlacing the branches and trunks of willows and alders,
and swinging across from summit to summit in heavy festoons.
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