The Purple Sage.... and bonsai

PaulH

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I've been re-reading Zane Greys "Riders of the Purple Sage" for the first time since I was a cowboy wannabe pre-teen. This paragraph made me want to get out and collect junipers. Residents of the high desert have always called junipers cedars. Grey is probably describing Utah junipers here. I wonder if reading this way back then lit a little bonsai fire in my sub-conscious.


"When he gained the cover of cedars he paused to rest and look, and it was then he saw how the trees sprang from holes in the bare rock. Ages of rain had run down the slope, circling, eddying in depressions, wearing deep round holes. There had been dry seasons, accumulations of dust, wind-blown seeds, and cedars rose wonderfully out of solid rock. But these were not beautiful cedars. They were gnarled, twisted into weird contortions, as if growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray, and old. Theirs had been a bitter fight, and Venters felt a strange sympathy for them. This country was hard on trees—and men."
 

jquast

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But these were not beautiful cedars. They were gnarled, twisted into weird contortions, as if growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray, and old. "

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
 
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