It is said to grow up through the snow; on the contrary,
it always waits until the ground is warm, though with other early
flowers it is occasionally buried or half-buried for a day or two
by spring storms. The entire plant--flowers, bracts, stem, scales,
and roots--is fiery red. Its color could appeal to one's blood.
Nevertheless, it is a singularly cold and unsympathetic plant. Everybody
admires it as a wonderful curiosity, but nobody loves it as lilies,
violets, roses, daisies are loved. Without fragrance, it stands beneath
the pines and firs lonely and silent, as if unacquainted with any other
plant in the world; never moving in the wildest storms; rigid as if
lifeless, though covered with beautiful rosy flowers.
Far the most delightful and fragrant of the Valley flowers is the
Washington lily, white, moderate in size, with from three- to
ten-flowered racemes. I found one specimen in the lower end of the
Valley at the foot of the Wawona grade that was eight feet high, the
raceme two feet long, with fifty-two flowers, fifteen of them open;
the others had faded or were still in the bud. This famous lily is
distributed over the sunny portions of the sugar-pine woods, never in
large meadow-garden companies like the large and the small tiger lilies
(pardalinum and parvum), but widely scattered, standing up to the waist
in dense ceanothus and manzanita chaparral, waving its lovely flowers
above the blooming wilderness of brush, and giving their fragrance to
the breeze.
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