The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Art Of Landscape Architecture

Then there are the battles of the seasons, heat and cold, freshet, and storm wind. Even the little waterside flower has to fight for its life, but it, too, gains its victory, and rest and happiness after all the disaster. The beauty and the modesty of the riverside flower is not to be gainsaid in the days of its victory. No stately plants of the palace garden can surpass it in loveliness. Can any denizen of the formal garden surpass in charm the subject of these beautiful lines:

The woodland willow stands a lonely bush
Of nebulous gold,
There the Spring Goddess comes in faint attire
Of frightened fire.
The golden willows lift
Their boughs the sun to sift,
Their sprays they droop to screen
The sky with veil of green,
A floating cage of song
Where feathered lovers throng.

The beauty and the dainty charm of plants, trees, and shrubs and flowers on the waterside transcends description. What a fascination there is in the waterlilies, Nuphar, Nelumbium, and Nymphaea—and it is not easy to locate them rightly. It needs study and it should not be undertaken lightly, although easy enough if you know how to do it. Without much study and observation success in managing these little water plants is not easy to attain. The following lines of Robert Bridges show a fine knowledge of the common water-lily of lakes and streams, a knowledge of a kind that is often lacking in poets:

But in the purple pool there nothing grows,
Not the white water-lily spoked with gold,
Though best she loves the hollows, and well knows
On quiet streams her broad shields to unfold,
Yet should her roots but try within these deeps to lie,
Not her long-reaching stalk could ever hold her waxen
head so high.'