THE LEAVES.

[Calyx]The green calyx wraps its sepals about the end of the corolla tube, and when the corolla falls the calyx covers nicely the ovary and helps it protect the ovules.But this is not all.[Ovary]

[Calyx]

The green calyx wraps its sepals about the end of the corolla tube, and when the corolla falls the calyx covers nicely the ovary and helps it protect the ovules.

But this is not all.

[Ovary]

When the bees have been and have left their message of life, and when the corolla has faded and fallen, the stems of the flowers turn down and hide the ovary with its seedlets under the leaves.

But this is not all.

[Flower]

The leaves work day and night to make food for the plant, and some of it goes to the ovules. The leaves eat what is in the air and change it to food for the rest of the plant and the ovules.

But this is not all.

The roots suck food from the hard earth; they help the leaves make food.

But this is not all.

The stems carry the food from the roots to the leaves, and from the leaves to the flowers, where it gets to the ovules.

Why should so much be done for the sake of the tiny ovules, white little atoms at the heart of the flower?

Why should the flowers care? Why should they spread bright corollas and arrange these cunning protections and draw up the sap for the sake of the tiny white ovules?

[Ovary]

Look into the ovary and see them.

Six small white things are they, so small and soft you would scarcely think they were worth much care.

But look again and think a little. They are very wonderful, although so small. They grow to the ovary by a little stem; they get the good sap to grow on through this stem. They have a little hole through their delicate coats, and through this hole the pollen enters.

When the pollen is in, the little hole closes, and the ovules feel strong and alive. They draw in the sap the leaves have made them through their little stem; they grow larger and firmer. They cease to be tiny white round things; they get two leaves with a little stem and a bud between them.

They are no longer ovules, they are seeds. They are little sleeping vines. In each black little seed is a whole vine packed away.

After a time the old vine will fade away. It will fall and turn brown. It will do no more work of changing gases and minerals into living plant. Itwill not again have green leaves and bear bright flowers.

But there will be more morning-glories, for the vine has stored some of its life in the seeds, and they will not fade and cease to work. All that is left of the life of the vine is in the seeds. All the morning-glories that will grow and delight us with their bright flowers next summer lie packed away in the dark seeds.

Dear little seeds, live on through the cold winter; without you we never again could see our bright morning-glories!

And that is why the vines take such care of the seeds; the whole race of morning-glories is in their keeping.

THE LEAVES.

The leaves of the morning-glory consider each other. They stand close together, but, as you see, they do not crowd.

[Leaves]

They turn a little to one side that all may have as much room as possible, for each needs all the light and air it can get.

The leaves also have regard for the roots working away in the dark earth. Instead of being flat, they have a channel down the middle, a gutter to convey the rain water from leaf to leaf, and finally to the ground above the roots.

Some of the roots, it is true, stray away, but some stay close to the plant and suck up the rain the leaves send them.

The young leaves fold together. They are very tender, and too much cold or too much heat would harm them; and if they were open, the sun would draw away too much of their water.

[Leaves]

So they lie close and snug, and do not open until they have grown large and strong enough to meet the bright sunshine and the cold night.

Then they open wide; they become green and do their work, which is to make food for the plant.

TO THE MORNING-GLORY.

[Morning-Glory]

What do you do with your pollen so white?What do you do with your honey so sweet?What is the use of your border so bright?And what is the use of your calyx so neat?

What do you do with your pollen so white?

What do you do with your honey so sweet?

What is the use of your border so bright?

And what is the use of your calyx so neat?

THE CONVOLVULUS FAMILY.

[Convolvulus]

This is a large and, on the whole, aristocratic family.

About two thousand different kinds of plants belong to it; but not so many in our climate. Perhaps not more than two hundred of the Convolvulaceæ, which is the proper name of this family, come as far North as we live.

They are rather cold-blooded people, these Convolvulaceæ, and prefer to stay in or near the tropics.

Up our way are the morning-glories, as you know. This is not their native home, though, as it is of the bloodroots, the bindweeds, and all the other wild flowers.

They were brought here from the hot part of America, near the equator. Somebody saw them, no doubt, and of course fell in love with them and sent some seeds to their friends in the North, or else took them when they went home.

Perhaps a sailor boy, landing in South America and seeing the bright flowers in the morning sunshine, thought of the New England village where he lived and which he often longed for there in that strange hot country, and perhaps he sent the seeds of these bright flowers home in a letter. But whoever may have sent the first seeds, it is certain the morning-glories received a hearty welcome in our Northern world. And they soon behaved like old settlers.

They grew cheerily where they were planted, and their seeds fell to the ground, where they managed to survive the cold Northern winter.

This must have been a great surprise to them the first time they felt it!

Then up they came in the spring just as though they were at home. They even strayed away from the people’s gardens and grew wild near the villages.

Perhaps they met their Northern cousins the bindweeds there. And what a surprisethatmust have been,—to come up from South America and find amember of one’s own family who had always lived in the cold North!

See how astonished the morning-glory at the bottom of the page looks as it gazes upon its cousin the bindweed!

For the bindweeds, you must know, are like the bloodroots and mandrakes and other wild flowers; they are natives of our Northern climate.

[Convolvulus]

There are several kinds of bindweeds just as there are several kinds of morning-glories; but they are all, morning-glories and bindweeds alike, descended from some way-back convolvulus ancestor, just as you and your cousins and your second cousins and your third cousins and your fourteenth cousins are all descended from the same great, great, great, way-back grandfather.

There is another member of the Convolvulus Family with which we are all pretty well acquainted, and that is our little red-flowered cypress vine. You remember it, with its feathery leaves which we train over trellises in our flower gardens.

You would hardly think at first glance that it was a relative of the morning-glory. But it is, as you would discover if you looked at it very carefully and saw how much it is like a morning-glory in its way of growing, in spite of appearances.

It comes to us from Mexico, and you could hardly expect a Mexican convolvulus to be just like a South American one, the habits of the two countries are so different, you know.

Why, you would hardly know your own relatives if they had been born and brought up in South America for a few generations.

The next time you go to Mexico be sure and look out for the cypress vine, which, for all I know, may be looked upon as just a common weed there, as we look at thistles and dandelions here. We would think thistles and dandelions beautiful flowers if we had to raise them in gardens with a great deal of trouble. But because we have to dig them out of our gardens and lawns we call them weeds and detest them.

Way down South, and also in some parts of Florida, there lives a lovely convolvulus. It grows something like our morning-glories, only its leaves are all sorts of shapes, heart-shaped and halberd-shaped and angled, all together on the same vine sometimes.

Its blossoms are real flower queens, they are so large and white and fragrant. They have a tube which is three or four inches long, and a snowy border still larger. They are calledbona nox, which you know very well is the Latin for “good night.”

The reason they are called this is, they do not open in the morning at all, but always at night.

People have them growing over their porches sometimes, and sometimes call them “moonflowers.”

The long white buds are twisted tightly shut in the daytime, but as soon as the sun sets, if you are watching, you will see something to astonish and delight you. For see, the bud moves a little! Then, all at once, the great white flower spreads out its corolla with a grace and serenity that thrill you. Before your very eyes the bud unfolds, and you have seen a flower blossom out! At the same moment a delicate and delightful fragrance fills the air.

But why does it bloom at night you ask.

The morning-glory has a bright bell to call the bees, but the bees do not fly at night. Does this large, fragrant white flower not care for the bees? Does it not wish pollen from other flowers?

That it does; above all things it wants pollen, and that is why it has opened this large, white, fragrant corolla.

See its tube, how long and deep. What bee could reach intothatnectary?

A humming bird might, but the humming birds are all tucked up on their tiny perches sound asleep. They will never sip the nectar from those large white moonflowers.

[Humming bird]

But what am I saying? Here comes one now! Such a whirr of wings! Such a dainty bird as poises before the large sweet flower! It thrusts in its bill, but stay! that is not a bird’s bill finding its way to the bottom of those deep-placed nectaries. It is a long, slender tube such as butterflies have, and this is no bird, but a large night-flying moth.

These moths are heavier than butterflies and look very much like humming birds when darting through the air.

But if you see one at rest you know at once it is no humming bird. When the humming birds are darting about in the sunshine, these moths are hidden beneath a leaf or in some other safe place.

Perhaps they fear some bird with a taste for moths will eat them if they come out. Perhaps they love the quiet night. However that may be, as soon asit is dusk they fly out. They are hungry after their sleep through the long summer day, and dart about to find flowers that are still open.

The morning-glories, we know, are closed, for they love the bees, but the moonflowers are filling the air with perfume; their fragrance guides the moths to the white flowers that shine out in the dim light.

Now you see why the moonflowers are white and why they are fragrant. They wish to call these friendly night-moths to come and carry pollen from flower to flower.

If they were red or purple the moths could not so easily see them, and if they had no odor the moths could not smell them a long way off, and so might not come close enough to find them.

So our fair Southern friend the moonflower loves the moths and not the bees. Into its long white tube their long, slender tongues can easily reach and find the nectar, and in taking it they brush the pollen against their tongues or their faces, and when they go to another flower it is rubbed against the stigma.

The sphinx moths are the fellows with long sucking tubes that fly in the evening.

A good many members of the Convolvulus Family make us happy by their beauty, but some of them do more than this. The sweet potato, for instance,gives us something to eat. You know what it gives us, but probably you did not know the sweet potato is a convolvulus and first cousin to the morning-glory and moonflower, and that it has come to us all the way from India.

Some say its home is in the East Indies too, and when you go there, if you look in the right place, you may see it growing wild. I doubt if the wild plant bears such big potatoes though; probably they are the result of long cultivation.

Sweet Potato Vine.

It is also said that its home is in tropical America. Very likely it belongs to all these places. Some plants have a way of living all over the world at once.

How they managed to get separated so far is a problem we must try to solve some day.

The sweet potato generally lies flat on the ground and sends out long stems in alldirections. Its leaves, as you can see, are more or less like morning-glory and bindweed leaves. Its flowers are also like morning-glories, though they are not so pretty. It has a habit of storing up quantities of starch and sugar in its roots. It does this, hoping to use the starch and sugar again as food in forming new shoots. But sometimes we step in and disarrange all these fine plans, for we, too, need starch and sugar as food, and we take the big sweet roots and eat them.

People plant large fields of sweet potatoes, particularly in the South. So next time you eat a sweet potato, remember it is one kind of morning-glory which has given it to you.

The sweet potatoes are no relation whatever to our common potatoes; they do not belong to the same family.

The sweet potato is not the only useful morning-glory. There is the jalap, though if you have ever made its acquaintance you may differ from me as to its value; for however useful it may be from the doctor’s point of view, it certainly possesses properties which are quite the reverse of agreeable.

It, too, forms large tubers, which it stores full of plant food, but it so happens that this particular plant food is not fit for human food. We put it toquite another use. In fact, jalap is used as a medicine. It grows very luxuriantly at Jalapa, or, as the Mexicans spell it, Xalapa, in Mexico, and that is the way it gets its name of jalap.

In spite of its very disagreeable taste and beneficial effect upon sick people, the jalap is a lovely vine with beautiful deep pink flowers.

If you saw it growing along the eastern slopes of the Mexican mountains you would never suspect it of being a medicine plant, and youmightnot suspect it of being a convolvulus, since its flowers are flat instead of tubular in form.

Scammony.

Several members of the Convolvulus Family have the same medicinal properties as jalap, and one in particular, whose name is scammony, is very highly esteemed.

It has an uncommonly bad taste, and its swollen roots are brought all the way from Syria and Asia Minor, not because of their bad taste, but because of their power as a medicine. The scammony, like the jalap, is a pretty plant in spite of its bad-tasting, medicinal roots.

Most of the Convolvulaceæ have a milky, bitter juice,—even our pretty,harmless morning-glories,—and in the jalap and scammony this seems to be exaggerated in quality and quantity.

A few of the Convolvulaceæ manage to make woody stems and become shrubs instead of vines.

Two of these live on the Canary Islands, and their sap, instead of being nauseous and bad-smelling, has a delicate and delicious fragrance. People take the wood from root and stems and press out the oil to be used in making perfumery.

Perhaps you know the odor of oil of rhodium. Whenever you smell it you are inhaling the fragrance from a Canary convolvulus.

It is a little surprising to find our convolvulus so widespread and so really useful in different parts of the world; but there is another side to the history of this highly respectable family.Everyfamily, probably, has its black sheep, and not even the Convolvulaceæ can hope to have all their relatives honest and useful or beautiful.

Still, one hates to speak of the dodders. They are in the world, however, and they belong to the Convolvulus Family; there is no denying that, however much one might like to. None of the Convolvulus Family ever speak of them—at least I have never heard of their doing so.

As a rule, the members of the Convolvulus Family are aristocrats. They have descended from a long line of plants that have gone on improving. That is what makes an aristocrat in plant land,—to be descended from a long line of plants that havekept on improving. Simply to belong to an old family does not count for much in the plant world, unless that old family has kept on doing something to improve itself.

We know the Convolvulaceæ are aristocrats for one thing by their tubular corollas; it took good, wide-awake ancestors to make corollas without separate petals anyway, and particularly tubular ones. Then their color tells their history. They are often blue or purple, which is averyaristocratic color among flowers. Instead of being blue-blooded, they are blue-colored.

The moonflower is not blue, but think what a tube it has and what a large fine corolla; and then think, too, that it has learned to bloom at night so as to get fertilized by the moths, andthatis a very aristocratic thing to do, I assure you.

If a flower blooms at night it is as great an honor as to wear a blue corolla. For you see it has taken as much growth in the direction of progress to acquire the night-blooming habit as to acquire a blue corolla.

The cypress vine has a red corolla, which is a good color, but not quite as advanced as blue. You see, in the beginning of the world flowers were yellow; then some became white, then pink. Probably red was the next step, then came purple, and last of all blue.

But the cypress vine has very finely divided leaves, as you remember, and in that it is ahead of the morning-glories. For in the beginning of the world, we are told, leaves were not divided, and only after a long time did some plants learn to divide them, and so increase their usefulness as leaves.

But when we come to the dodders, they have no leaves at all. The reason for this is, they do no work for themselves. The green leaves, as you know, prepare the food for the plant and work very hard to do it. If the dodders have no leaves, where do they get their food? That is just the trouble. They make other plants give it to them. They are very much like tramps, going about and living on other people. Only they are worse than tramps, for they do not say, “Please give me something to eat. I am hungry and want some starch and nitrogen compounds.” They do nothing of the sort. They catch hold of another plant and take away its juices without leave or license. So you see they are reallythieves and robbers, these rascally dodders. No wonder the morning-glories are not proud of them. Not that the dodders care. It is a question whether they even know they are related to the morning-glories.

They think of little but how to get something to eat out of other people.

They begin their shameful career from the very seed. Instead of sprouting in the spring with the other seeds, they lie still until all the other plants have gone out of their seeds and are at work making green leaves and storing their stems with plant juices.

[Dodder]

Then Dodder the Robber comes out. But instead of sending down a root and up a stem like other seeds, he just pushes out a little thread-like body, which fastens into the ground. You might think this an honest little root going down into the ground if you did not know friend Dodder. But it is no root; it does not suck up juices from the earth: it simply anchors the little robber so he cannot be blown away. Now the thread-like body grows larger and sticks up out of the ground, carrying the seed-coat with it. The seed-coat is packed with food which the parent plant stored away there. The young doddernourishes itself with this food until it is all gone; then it casts off the empty seed-coat, and behold young Dodder ready for the fray. What he very much wants at this time is a fresh young twig to cling to and suck the juice out of. If nothing of the sort is handy he is in a bad way, for he is too helpless to do anything for himself. He has no green leaves, and does not know how to make any, and without green leaves he cannot get a thing to eat. Poor Dodder! after all, it is not wholly his fault he is such a good-for-nothing specimen of planthood. You see he came from bad stock. His parents were like this before him, and no one has ever taught him any better. Well, there he lies, as helpless a plant as you can imagine. But just let a green shoot come within reach!Thenyou will see! He twists around it without stopping to say “by your leave.” He pierces it with little suckers that draw out its juices. Now Dodder is all right. He has plenty of food without the trouble of making a bit of it himself.

[Dodder]

And then how he grows! Up the poor weed he twines, a slender yellow stemthat looks as much like yellow yarn as anything else. Around and around he turns; he has no leaves to make, only useless little scales that show where long ago his ancestors once had honest leaves.

You will sometimes find the weeds in a damp place a perfect tangle of dodder vines, so that nothing else is to be seen. They cover the weeds, sucking out their juices and smothering them. And when the time comes the dodder breaks out into innumerable bunches of flowers, which grow at short distances along the yellow stems. These flowers are small and generally white, and clustered so close together that they form a sort of knot or rosette on the stem.

You would never imagine to look at them that they belonged to our Morning-Glory Family.

Their corollas are more or less cleft, being grown together only at the base.

Sometimes the flowers are orange-colored or reddish, but they do not seem to attract the insects much. Nor do they care, for they can easily fertilize themselves, the anthers and stigmas being so close together. They have none of the ingenious arrangements for cross-fertilization that characterize their more fortunate relatives. They are thoroughly degraded plants.

There lives a dodder in Europe which grows upon flax, and so does damage to the flax fields, and I am sorry to say this little pest has tramped his way across the ocean intoourflax fields. We do not thank Europe at all for sending us such an emigrant.

As the dodders have nothing to do but suck the juices of other plants and make seeds out of them, you may be sure they set any quantity of seeds to keep up the disreputable race of dodders.

Yet, in spite of the dodders, dear Convolvulus People, let us say to you, as our beloved old Rip Van Winkle says to us, “May you live long and prosper, and all your family!”

[Convolvulus]

Stories About the Geranium Family

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