LESSON VIII.
THE COLOR OF PLANTS.
Almost the first thing that you will notice about a plant is its color. The little child, before it can speak, will hold out its hands for a bright red rose, or a golden lily. I think the color is one of the most wonderful things about a plant.
Come into the field. Here you see a yellow buttercup, growing near a white daisy. Beside them is a red rose. Close by, blooms a great purple flower. All grow out of the same earth, and breathe the same air. Yet how they differ in color.
Some flowers have two or three colors upon each petal. Have you not seen the tulip with its striped blossoms, and the petunias spotted with white and red?
The flower of the cotton plant changes in color. Within a few days this flower appears in three distinct hues. The chicory blossom changes from blue to nearly white as the day grows warm.
Look at your mother’s roses. Some are white, others are red, pink, or yellow. None are ever blue.
Then look at a wild-rose tree. The root and stem arebrown. The green color is in the leaves, and in some of the stems. The petals are red. The stamens and pistils are yellow.
You never saw the red color get astray and run into the leaves. The leaf-green did not lose itself, and travel up to the petals. The stamens and pistils did not turn brown instead of golden.
Does not that seem a wonder, now that you think of it? Perhaps you never noticed it before. It is one thing to see things, and another to notice them so that you think about them.
Here is another fact about color in plants. All summer you see that the leaves are green. In the autumn they begin to change. You wake up some fine frosty morning and the tree leaves are all turned red, yellow, brown, or purple. It is a fine sight.
It is the going away of the leaf-green from the leaf that begins the change of leaf-color in the fall. The leaves have done growing. Their stems are hard and woody. They do not breathe as freely as they did. The sap does not run through them as it did early in the season.
The leaf-green shrinks up in the cells. Or, it goes off to some other part of the plant. Sometimes part of it is destroyed. Then the leaves begin to change.
Sometimes a red sap runs into the leaf cells. Or, an oily matter goes there, in place of the “leaf-green.”
The leaf-green changes color if it gets too much oxygen. In the autumn the plant does not throw out so much oxygen. What it keeps turns the leaf-green from green to red, yellow, or brown.
The bright color in plants is not in the flower alone. You have seen that roots and seeds have quite as bright colors as blossoms. What flowers are brighter than many fruits are?
The cherry is crimson, or pink, or nearly black. What a fine yellow, red, purple, we find in plums! Is there any yellow brighter than that of the Indian corn? Is there a red gayer than you find on the apples you like so well? What is more golden than a heap of oranges?
If you wish to find splendid color in a part of a plant, look at a water-melon. The skin is green marked with pale green, or white. Next, inside, is a rind of pale greenish white. Then comes a soft, juicy, crimson mass. In that are jet black seeds.
Oh, where does all this color come from? Why is it always just in the right place? The melon rind does not take the black tint that belongs to the seeds. The skin does not put on the crimson ofthe pulp. See, too, how this color comes slowly, as the melon ripens. At first the skin is of the same dark green as the leaves, and inside all is of a greenish white.
Let us try to find out where all this color comes from. Do you know we ourselves can make changes in the color of flowers? Take one of those big hydrangeas. It has a pink flower. But give it very rich black earth to grow in. Mix some alum and iron with the earth. Water it with strong bluing water. Lay soot and coal-dust upon the earth it grows in. Very soon your hydrangea will have blue flowers, instead of pink ones.
Once I had a petunia with large flowers of a dirty white color. I fed it with soot and coal-dust. I watered it with strong bluing water. After a few weeks my petunia had red or crimson flowers. Some of the flowers were of a very deep red. Others were spotted with red and white.
Now from this you may guess that the plant obtains much of its color from what it feeds on in the soil.
But you may give the plant very good soil, and yet if you make it grow in the dark, it will have almost no color. If it lives at all, even the green leaves will be pale and sickly.
This will show you that the light must act in some way on what the plant eats, to make the fine color.
The plant, you know, eats minerals from the earth. In its food it gets little grains of coloring stuff.
But how the color goes to the right place we cannot tell. We cannot tell why it is, that from the same earth, in the same light, there will be flowers of many colors. We cannot tell why flowers on the same plant, or parts of the same flower, will have different colors. That is one of the secrets and wonders that no one has found out.
There are many plants which store up coloring matter, just as plants store up starch, or sugar. The indigo, which makes our best blue dye, comes from a plant. Ask your mother to show you some indigo. When the plant is soaked in water the coloring stuff sinks to the bottom of the water, like a blue dust.
Did you ever notice the fine red sumac? That gives a deep yellow dye. The saffron plant is full of a bright orange color. Other plants give other dyes.
Sometimes children take the bright petals of plants, or stems, that have bright color in them, to paint with. Did you ever do that? You can first draw a picture, and then color it, by rubbing on it the colored parts of plants.
Some trees and plants, from which dyes are made, have the coloring stuff in the bark or wood. That is the way with the logwood tree. The best black dye is made from that.
You have seen how much dark red juice you can find in berries. Did you ever squeeze out the red juice of poke or elder berries? It is like red ink. Did you ever notice how strawberries stain your fingers red? Grapes and blackberries make your lips and tongue purple.
No doubt you have often had your hands stained brown, for days, from the husks of walnuts. All these facts will show you what a deal of color is taken up from the soil by plants, changed by the sun, and stored up in their different parts.
But the chief of all color in the plant is the leaf-green. We cannot make a dye out of that.
Leaf-green is the color of which there is the most. It is the color which suits the eye best of all. How tired we should be of crimson or orange grass!
Though leaves and stems are generally green, there are some plants which have stems of a bright red or yellow color. Yellow is the common color for stamens and pistils. In some plants, as the tulip, the peach, and others, the stamens are of a deep red-brown, or crimson, or pink, or even black color.