Plants and their children

by Frances Theodora Parsons

Try to get a branch from the dogwood tree (only be sure to break it off where it will not be missed), and pull apart what looks so much like one large flower.

First pull off the four white leaves. Then you will have left a bunch of tiny greenish blossoms. Look at one of these through a magnifying glass. If eyes and glass are both good, you will see a very small calyx, a corolla made up of four little flower leaves, four mites of stamens, and a tiny pistil,—a perfect little flower where you never would have guessed it.

But all by themselves they would never be noticed: so a number of them club together, surrounding themselves with the showy leaves which light up our spring woods.

In Fig. [262] you see the flower cluster of the hobblebush.

The hobblebush has still another way of attracting attention to its blossoms. It surrounds a cluster of those flowers which have stamens and pistils, and so are ready to do their proper work in the world, with a few large blossoms which have neither stamens nor pistils, but which are made up chiefly of a showy white corolla. These striking blossoms serve to call attention to their smaller but more useful sisters.

Fig. 262

Sometimes a whole plant family will play this trick of putting a quantity of flowers in one bunch or cluster.

Fig. 263