>>2686894>It was riparian forests, brush and old growth that got more arid as you went south.Are you calling John Muir a liar? lol You're done.
AN EARLY ACCOUNT OF THE CENTRAL VALLEY PRAIRIE
There are several accounts of the flower-rich flora of the Central Valley in the era before large-scale
agriculture, but perhaps none as eloquent as this, from John Muir:
The Great Central Plain of California, during the months of March, April, and May, was one smooth, continuous
bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than
400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castilleias,
and innumerable compositæ were so crowded together that, had ninety-nine per cent of them been taken away,
the plain would still have seemed to any but Californians extravagantly flowery. The radiant, honey-ful corollas,
touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky—one sheet
of purple and gold, with the bright Sacramento pouring through the midst of it from the north, the San Joaquin
from the south, and their many tributaries sweeping in at right angles from the mountains, dividing the plain
into sections fringed with trees.
— from The Mountains of California by John Muir, 1894
