IV
SOME FLOWERS LIVE OFF OTHER FLOWERS AND PLANTS
So summer with its song and its blossom came to an end. Autumn clad in gold and purple came across the land, and the gentle haze of Indian summer lay upon the fields. From the banks of golden-rod below the hill, Prue and Davy filled jars and vases, and one day they brought in great bunches all linked and bound together with something like a tangle of golden thread.
The Chief Gardener was not at home that day, so they brought their discovery to big Prue to explain.
"Why," she said, "that is dodder, or love-vine. It is what is called a parasite, for it has no root in the ground, but lives from the plant it grows on."
Then she showed them where the small, tough little rootlets were really embedded in the stalk of the golden-rod from which it drew its strength and life.
"Oh," said Prue, "that is what Papa meant when he told us once that some flowers lived off other flowers and plants, just as some people live off other people."
Big Prue nodded.
"There are a good many such plants," she said. "The mistletoe we get for Christmas grows on several sorts of trees. Its seed lodges under the bark and sprouts there, just as it would in the ground. Then the wood grows up around the root, and the mistletoe becomes almost a part of the tree. Then there are many kinds of mosses, and the Indian pipe—that white, waxy flower which you found in the woods not long ago, and thought you had found a flowering mushroom. It is a sort of a relation of the mushroom, for it springs from damp, decaying leaves, and has no real root, but it is more of a parasite, for it feeds mainly on roots of living trees and plants. This dodder blooms and drops its seeds to the ground, where they sprout, but as soon as it finds a weed to cling to, the root dies and it lives only on the weed."
"Why do they call it love-vine?" asked little Prue.