In San Francisco now the lilacs are in bloom but it is not lilac time.
In Golden Gate Park the rhododendrons are blossomed into gorgeous mounds
of color but they are not an event in San Francisco, only an incident.
In "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" set in the mountains of Virginia,
they are the dominant background.
Poppies and lupine and many others are the flower tradition of
California but they are not what I mean here. It is an impression of
mine that San Francisco more than any other city has taken the
traditional plants and flowers of other sections and made them into a
composite that makes up the plant atmosphere of this city.
Take roses and geraniums and callas, none of which are epochal because
they are always at hand. But with old Mrs. Deacon Rogers in Connecticut
who nursed her calla through the long winter that she might take it to
church on Easter Sunday, the calla was history.
Even the camellia San Franciscans take very philosophically. It has not,
for instance, the supremacy that Dumas gives it in "Camille." In
Sacramento they feature it more and an Easterner who saw them picking it
in branches instead of single flowers, exclaimed: "Why, they think
they're oleanders."
The plant and flower atmosphere of a community is very important. Some
child is now growing up in the city, who some day will be far away when
there will come to him a whiff, perhaps of acacia, and in an instant
there will come surging over him all the feel and urge and thrill and
wistfulness and dreams of his childhood, and he will be once more in the
atmosphere of San Francisco.
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