This is often considered the handsomest flower in the West, and it would be hard to find anything more beautiful and striking than its magnificent blossoms. The plant has somewhat the effect of a Summer Peony bush. Sometimes, in cultivation, as much as five feet high with many smooth stems, and handsome, smooth, light green foliage, the leaves cut and lobed - those near the top with a few prickles.
The splendid flowers are enormous - from five to nine inches across, with diaphanous white petals crinkled like crepe tissue paper, and bright golden centers composed of hundreds of yellow stamens surrounding a greenish white pistil.
The blossoms remain open for several days. The hard round buds are covered with short brown hairs. This is the true Matilija Poppy (pronounced Mat-il-i-ha) as it is the kind that grows in the canyon of that name, but the tremendous floods of 1914 drowned most of these beautiful plants in that locality.
HERE is a most interesting Spanish legend connected with the Matilija Poppy, and its habit of growing in inaccessible canon fastnesses in its more northerly habitat.
In the days of romance before the Gringo came to wrest from nature her repose of centuries, it was the custom in the Southland for gallant lovers to seek diligently for the first love flower - Matilija Poppy - that opened in the spring on the nearest mountainside.
This great, snowy flower with its heart of gold was the silent but sweetest of messengers that found him favor, and brought a soft light to the dark eyes of his expectant amorita.
If a fatal accident befell the seeker, the nearest love flower would, it was said, bloom pink in the coming spring. When two caballeros sought the same fair one's hand and she found it hard to decide, it was the one who first climbed the most inaccessible heights and hastened back with the earliest love flower, thus proving his ardor and prowess, who was accepted.
Many are the whispered tales of dark and treacherous deeds when contestants met in lonely canons and on overhanging cliffs, and it is even whispered that a love flower once blossomed a blood red to mark the spot where a worthy lover had battled valiantly, but lost the love flower and his life.
~ Emory Smith, The Golden Poppy, 1901
An hour or two at the baths each day, long tramps over peak and ravine, glorious nights in a hammock beneath the open sky, early breakfasts of fresh trout caught in the mountain creek when the long afternoon shadows fill the gorge, and endless hours of dreaming under the old spreading oaks, make one feel peaceful - that he has been given renewed life....
It was with many regretful sighs we took our way down the Matilija, accompanied by the old native Californian who had often beguiled the hours with stories of earlier days, and with melodious strains upon his loved guitar, and who was now about to bid us a gracious farewell hoping that we would come again to visit the happy valley in other years.
We left the camp by moonlight.
The soft radiance on the heights and the deep shadows below us enhanced the beauties of the picturesque ravine, and lent to it a delightful sense of mystery.
The stream ran purling softly beside us in the darkness, like a friendly sprite loath to let us depart from these inviting haunts unattended. Further on, where its waters spread, gurgling over stones into a shallow pool between the lower hills, we caught a faint sparkle from the moonbeams that slanted through the dwarfed oaks foliage into its limpid ripples....
"It is Amatil who laughs and beckons to you", said our guide. "Who was she," we asked, "Some Mexican senorita that used to dwell here?"
"No, senors, it was before the days of the Mexicans - ages ago, when Indians roved these hills. Her father was a great chief and very proud of his little daughter. But an enemy stole her from the canyon and she was never seen again. She grew up among strangers far away."
"Her story was brought to the old chief, years after, by a wanderer from another tribe, saying that she pined away and died, but that she promised that her spirit would come back to the canyon to sing for him again.
"He used to sit alone by the stream to listen for her laughing voice, and the Indians called its waters ever after 'Am atil haha'. The Spaniards have only changed the name a little, so it is 'Matilija', and up there you see the Sleeping Chieftain who still hears her happy laughter in his dreams."
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