SANDY FERTILITY
San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills. They yield a generous
vegetation. All your rare flowers, which people in "the States" rear with such patient care in
parlor flower pots and green houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year round.
Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses — I don't know the names of a
tenth part of them. I only know that while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of
snow, Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only keep their hands
off and let them grow. And I have heard that we have here that rarest and most curious of all
flowers, the beautiful Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it — or flower of the Holy Spirit —
though I never have seen it anywhere but in Central America — down on the Isthmus. In its cup is
the daintiest little fac-simile of a dove, as pure and white as snow. The Spaniards have a
superstitious reverence for it. The blossom has been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether;
and the bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived, has
failed.
