[The Mountains of California by John Muir]@TWC D-Link bookThe Mountains of California CHAPTER VI 7/29
To these fresh soil-beds come many a waiting plant.
First, a hardy carex with arching leaves and a spike of brown flowers; then, as the seasons grow warmer, and the soil-beds deeper and wider, other sedges take their appointed places, and these are joined by blue gentians, daisies, dodecatheons, violets, honeyworts, and many a lowly moss.
Shrubs also hasten in time to the new gardens,--kalmia with its glossy leaves and purple flowers, the arctic willow, making soft woven carpets, together with the heathy bryanthus and cassiope, the fairest and dearest of them all.
Insects now enrich the air, frogs pipe cheerily in the shallows, soon followed by the ouzel, which is the first bird to visit a glacier lake, as the sedge is the first of plants. So the young lake grows in beauty, becoming more and more humanly lovable from century to century.
Groves of aspen spring up, and hardy pines, and the Hemlock Spruce, until it is richly overshadowed and embowered.
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