Dodder
No plant would invite such a miserable pauper as a visitor. It’s worse than any beggar you have ever known, for a beggar at least digests his own food.
Not so with dodder. It is too lazy to do even that! It has therefore, no leaves. It doesn’t need them. It starts out as an honest plant baby, but soon “goes wrong,” reaching out long tendrils by which it takes hold of any convenient plant neighbor. It sends little leg-like suckers down into the stem of this plant neighbor. It lets go of the earth with its roots, and drinks the life-blood, or sap, of its host, the plant on which it has seized hold.
The disgracefully lazy dodder does no work at all except to make flowers and seeds. The flowers are tiny, star-shaped, of a yellowish, greenish or white color, and each flower makes four seeds to go on to make more thieving plant babies!
“Isn’t it disgraceful!” exclaimed Bet. “Jack and I never want to associate with plants that murder and steal——”
“Not if we can help it,” said Jack, “we don’t.”
“You’ll be sorry,” he went on, “to learn that Indian pipes, too, are uninvited guests, living on food in other plant roots.”
“Oh,” said Mary Frances regretfully, “I always thought them so pretty!”
“Well, they are pretty, and dodder, even, is pretty in a way, because of its yellow color, but both are—