THE HUSBANDS AND WIVES OF PLANTS
Mrs. Edson drew a long breath because
she knew the time had arrived when, for her little
daughter’s sake, she must give her the information
which would mark her growth from girlhood into young
womanhood, and the fact disturbed her, for she did
not want to lose her little girl, even in exchange
for the lovely young lady whom she knew would take
that dear little girl’s place. But it must
be done, and, thankful that she had studied the subject
enough to know how to do it in a nice and plain way,
she began:
“In the first place, dear,”
she said, “you must know that the flowers are
the husbands and wives of plants, made so by nature.
They are in their way as truly married as Mr. and
Mrs. Jones are in their way, or as your papa and I
are. This marriage is a law of nature, invented
to carry on the race, whatever that race may be, whether
it is that of mankind, or plants, or animals, or birds,
or even fishes. For not only do men and flowers
marry, everything in nature does the same turtles,
frogs, robins, elephants, everything!”
Elsie wished very much at this point
to ask if her mother had ever seen an elephant’s
wife, thinking that she must look rather funny, much
different, to say the least, from a flower’s
wife, but as the answer came to her at once, without
asking the question, she said nothing. Of course
an elephant’s wife must be another elephant,
as the flower’s wife was another flower.
But it was all very singular, and the sparkle of her
eyes as she looked into her mother’s face showed
her interest in what might be coming. Mrs. Edson
went on:
“We will begin with plants,
because they came first into the world as living beings,
and all other living beings not only had their origin
in plants but live by aid of them to this day.
From the plants grew animals, and from animals grew
men and women and little girls. It took a long,
long time for all this to come about, so long that
the human mind fails to grasp or comprehend it; and
at first, when one hears of it for the first time,
it seems wholly impossible and unbelievable.
But science has proved it to be true, and even shows
the exact way in which the various changes were made.
Many, if not all, the steps by which we mounted from
the condition of a tiny speck of jelly-plant, a speck
no bigger than the point of a pin, to become human
beings are still in existence and are frequently observed
by scientists. With a microscope anybody may
see them. So we know that the theory of evolution,
as it is called, is a true one. It is also an
exceedingly wonderful and beautiful truth, full of
secrets and surprises of the most interesting and
delightful kind, as I shall show. Now let’s
go and examine the buttercup that the bee just married
to the second buttercup.”
Elsie jumped up with a little gurgle
of joy and ran ahead of her mother to the flower.
This was better than playing “secret” with
Rosie and Eva and the other girls, for their secrets
were not real ones, they were just made up and they
did not amount to very much after all, but this was
a real one, kept up in earnest with the bees and flowers.
And now she was to be let into it! Mrs. Edson
bent over the bright yellow blossom, taking it gently
in her fingers to prevent it from nodding so briskly
in the breeze that they should be unable to examine
it closely.
“You see, dear,” she said,
pointing with a twig to the different parts as she
named them, “right here, in the exact center
of the blossom, is a bunch of green growing in the
form of an oval, shaped somewhat like an egg with
the smaller end upward.”
“Yes, oh, yes!” Elsie
answered eagerly. “What is it, mamma?”
“Broadly speaking we will call
it the ovary. I am not going to confuse you by
giving you too many hard words at first, words like
corolla, carpel, style, stigma, and the like.
I shall name only two parts of the flower for you
to remember just now, because only two are really
necessary to be named at this point. So the name
of this one is what?”
“Ovary!” answered Elsie quickly.
“Yes, ovary! It is called
so because it contains ovules, which are tiny
seeds or eggs. That is the mother part of the
plant.”
“The mother!” Elsie queried.
“Why, mamma, is there a father too?”
“Yes, dearie, many plants have
both a mother and a father part, which grow near together
in the same flower, while other plants have only a
father part, and still others have only a mother part.
This buttercup has both, has both the male and the
female principle. The ovary is the female, and
here, above it and surrounding it, you see a number
of taller spires, yellow in color and each of them
bearing a tiny enlargement, a kind of knob, at the
top.”
“Yes, yes, but that that
can’t be the papa part! Is it, mamma?”
she cried, examining the rather insignificant appearing
spires dubiously. “They don’t look
much like a a papa!” she said in some
disappointment. Her mother laughed.
“They certainly do not look
much like a man-papa,” she returned, “but
they form the papa part of the plant, nevertheless,
and are truly the papas of the baby buttercups.
And their name is the second one that I wish you to
remember from now on. It is stamen.”
“Stamen!” said Elsie.
“Yes, each of these stems is
called a stamen, and they form the male part of the
plant, the father part. Many plants, those of
the simpler kinds, have only one stamen and it grows
in the flower so that its head hangs right above the
ovary. Here you see that all of the stamens are
above the ovary, and the reason why they are placed
there by nature you will see very soon. What
I wish now is to show you why the bee came to the
flower.”
“I know it was for
honey! Isn’t that what you said before,
mamma?”
“Yes, darling, but do you see any honey here?”
“No, mamma, and I never knew
before that buttercups had honey. I always thought
honey came from a beehive.”
“It does come to us from a beehive,
but it comes from flowers first, and one of the many
kinds that furnish it is this buttercup. The bee
sips it from the flowers, just a tiny bit from each
blossom that he visits, and when he has enough he
takes it home to the hive and puts it away to eat
by-and-by, in the winter, when there are no flowers
growing for him to rifle. He does it just as men
lay away money for ’a rainy day,’ as we
say, and as squirrels lay up a store of nuts for the
cold weather. Now, suppose you count those flattened,
round-cornered parts of the buttercup how
many are there?”
“Five,” said Elsie quickly.
“Yes, there are five of them,
and they are called petals. You will notice that
they are much narrower and slighter at the bottom than
they are at the top. It is at the bottom that
they are joined to the central part of the flower.
Now, just where they are connected with this central
part there is a tiny sack of honey.”
“It must be very tiny,”
said Elsie, regarding the slender connection earnestly,
“for there isn’t room enough for much,
I’m sure. And it must be all covered up,
for I can’t see any signs of it.”
“It is covered up. There
is a very small scale, or leaf, over it to protect
it from those insects who have no right to the honey.
But the bee knows how to get at it, and he does so
very quickly, once he alights on the blossom, as we
have just seen one do. For while he appeared
as if he were merely tumbling clumsily around on the
flower he was sampling those honey-sacks, and we saw
how speedily he finished all five of them on this
flower and then buzzed busily away to the other.”
“He was just the same as at
dinner, then, wasn’t he mamma! But why did
he go to the other flower didn’t he
get all he wanted from this one?”
“No, darlingest, he gets but
very little from each flower. If he could take
all he wanted from one he would never fly right to
another. And then, if all the other insects should
do the same, the whole plan of nature would fall through
and there would soon be no life on earth.”
Elsie’s eyes looked very large when she heard
this.
“Would I die, and you, mamma,
and all of us Alice and Rosie, and, oh,
everybody we know?”
“Yes, dearie, all of us.
Those few simple plants which still, in the primitive
way, fertilize themselves, are not enough and are too
weak to carry on the vegetation of the earth, and
without the insects and birds and the wind we never
should have been born at all; for they are necessary
to make the plants reproduce their kinds and grow,
and the plants are necessary food for us as well as
for the animals that we eat, such as the hens and
ducks and sheep and cows. So nature has given
each flower only a little honey, not enough for the
bee, and he is compelled to fly to many before he
becomes satisfied. And this brings us back to
the stamen and ovary again, to show what they are
for and how the bee marries the two plants together
after he has collected his fee of delicious honey.”
“I am all ’tention,”
said Elsie, in so quaint an imitation of older folks
that her mother was forced to smile, knowing that she
had a listener that was interested, to say the least a
listener who felt the importance and gravity of the
study which they were now pursuing. Elsie never
attempted big words except when she felt dignified.