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Updated: May 9, 2025
Goldenrods, asters, gilias, lilies, and lupines, with many other less conspicuous plants, occur in warm sheltered openings in these lower woods, making charming gardens of wildness where bees and butterflies are at home and many a shy bird and squirrel. The next higher is the Fir Zone, made up almost exclusively of two species of silver fir.
Then, too, is the time for the moonlit boating where the Potomac narrows between steep and romantic banks of a sylvan wildness, and where the long oars of the swift rowers bear you as if on wings; for picnics to Rock Creek, a region of rude beauty, where the woods abound in lupines and pink azaleas, and the great white dogwood boughs stretch away into the darkness of the forest like a press of moonbeams, and where at dark your horses ford the stream and climb the hill, and bring you over the Georgetown Heights, past villas half-guessed by starlight among their gardens and fountains, and in by a market picturesque with a hundred torches flaring over the heads of mules and negroes and venders and higglers piles of game, crisp vegetables and scarlet berries.
It is not easy always to be attentive to the maturing of wild fruit. Plants are so unobtrusive in their material processes, and always at the significant moment some other bloom has reached its perfect hour. One can never fix the precise moment when the rosy tint the field has from the wild almond passes into the inspiring blue of lupines.
The First Four Miles. If the rains are just over, the rough rocks will be entirely covered and hidden by a gorgeous growth of sunflowers and lupines, the yellows and purples making a carpet that, in the brilliant sunlight, fairly dazzles the eye. Here and there a band of sheep may be seen, with straggling herds of cattle and horses.
For hours and hours of motor speed, we glided through a snowy world that showed no speck of black bark or fleck of green leaf; a world in which the sole relief from a silent white blizzard of blossom was the blue of the sky arch, the purple of distant lupines alternating with the gold of blood-centered poppies, pouring like avalanches down hills of emerald green.
As time went on, however, the girl surprised herself by not being able to hate her home. She found mysteriously lovely colours in the yellow-gray desert; shadows blue as lupines and purple as Russian violets; high lights of shimmering, pale gold.
There were miles of yellow and red poppies, leagues of lupines that painted the gently rounded hills with soft primary hues, and long continuous slopes, like low mountain systems, of daisies and dandelions.
If it be the excrements in the intestines, which by their long stay increase their pains, give them at the month a little oil of sweet almonds and syrup of roses; if it be worms, lay a cloth dipped in oil of wormwood mixed with ox-gall, upon the belly, or a small cataplasm, mixed with the powder of rue, wormwood, coloquintida, aloes, and the seeds of citron incorporated with ox-gall and the powder of lupines.
A few years before it had flowed down red-hot. Further up we reached large stretches of rock. Here wild vines and lupines were growing in patches where the lava had decayed into soil. Then came bare slopes with dark hollow and sharp ridges. We walked on old stiff lava-streams. Sometimes we had to plod through piles of coarse, porous cinders.
There are yellow-mocassins, or ladies'-slippers, the same that I told you of a little while ago; and white lilies, crane-bills, and these pretty lilac geraniums; here are scarlet cups, and blue lupines they are all in bloom now and many others. If we were on the Rice Lake Plains, my lady, we could gather all these, and many, many more.
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