This section is from the book "The Gardener's Monthly And Horticulturist V26", by Thomas Meehan. See also: Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long.
A thistle - Cnicus occidentalis - a native of this State and Nevada, has a beautiful flower-head, :he mass of its disk flowers, of a maroon or purple lake color, being enclosed in a nearly spherical, spiny bracted, and much becobwebbed involucre. The plant is gray throughout and would look well in a group upon a lawn, or on the lawn's edge against some dark setting. No thistle yet seen by me has so handsome a flower-head as this.
Of the native Trifoliums growing in this vicinity 13 or 14 species and varieties - I think T. bar-bigerum and T. Macraei are the most effective. The former has an inflated standard and involu-cred head, the latter is non-involucrate.
Were California possessed of a properly stocked botanic garden she could show in it twenty-six species of clover, besides varieties, without going without her boundaries for them. This number does not include a single species of the eight mentioned in Gray's." Botany of the Northern United States," though T. repens might make a twenty-eighth species for California, as I have myself found it once or twice growing in a roadway here.
Santa Cruz, Cal.
 
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