As a Ghost Might

The Big Dipper is kind to streetlights — lets them boast, as a ghost might.

Now, you should know there’s a great being, gentle, wise, and invisible, who goes out at night and pulls up the roads, and carries them off in her arms, and who leaves trees, grass, and flowers growing in her path — To remind them, she says, and the breeze agrees, Yes.

Read the preface and Pages 1-12 of With the Flowers and Trees in California, by Charles Francis Saunders, with illustrations of flowers in color by Elisabeth Hallowell Saunders. McBride, Nast & Company, New York, 1914. Date acquired: February 4, 2012.

In preparing the following pages (which the scientific student, if he deigns to dip into them at all, will probably think sadly trivial at times), the author has by no means intended to cover the entire field of California plant life. Rather has he sought merely to touch in an informal sort of way upon certain characteristic features that enlist the interest of those travelers to whom the State’s wonderful floral and arboreal life, indigenous and exotic, makes any appeal at all.

Chapter I, In the Footsteps of Early Collectors. How the Virgin Flora Looked in the Padres’ Days; The Man of Grass, Old Curious and Fremont.

Late afternoon. Fifty degrees. A gray sky, deep and dark. Cut down the sunflowers, the thickest trunks being about two inches in diameter. Pulled out the root-balls, rocking the stumps back and forth. Put all in a heap, to admire for now, and to clear away later.

November 10, 2023.

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