Flower Plants
Flower Plants
THE SNOW PLANTS OF CALIFORNIA (cont)However, mushrooms live in damp forests, wheras snow plants live in relatively dry forests, although they are particularly sensitive to moisture. Their food suppply is in the upper layers of the soil, and most of the year where snow plants live these layers are either dry or covered with snow. Autumn brings some rain, but snows and freezing winds follow unpredictably and quickly. In spring when the snows are melting and the weather is warming, snow plants pop up near melting snow banks, the water encourages their growth. The bloom of snow plants follows the snow-melt as it recedes back into the dark forest and up to higher altitudes as spring progresses. Usually they appear at about the time the bears awake from hibernation and the mosquitoes hatch in bogs formed by melt-swollen streams. Because they are flowering plants--and presumably evolved from plants that turned sunlight, not humus, into food--the snow(Page FOUR of SEVEN)