Plants and their children

by Frances Theodora Parsons

As you learn more and more about them, you will begin to feel that in many ways plants are very much like people.

Both the pear and the apple belong to the Rose family. They are cousins to all the garden roses, as well as to the lovely wild rose that you meet so often in summer along the roadside.

Fig. 13

We know some families where the girls and boys look so much alike that we could guess they were brothers and sisters, even if we did not know that they all lived in the one house and had the one family name. If we look carefully at the plants we meet, at their leaves and flowers and fruits, and even at their stems and roots, often we may guess rightly which ones belong to the same family.

If we place side by side an apple blossom and a pear blossom, we see that they are very like each other. Both have the green outside cup which above is cut into five little green leaves. Both have five white or pinkish flower leaves. Both have a good many pins with dust boxes, and from two to five of those pins without dust boxes.

If we place side by side a pear and an apple, we see in both cases that it is the green cup, grown big and juicy and ripe, which forms the delicious fruit.

If we cut these two fruits open lengthwise, we can see just how the pins without dust boxes are set into the green cup; and we can see that the lower, united part of these pins makes a little box which holds the seeds.

In the picture (Fig. [14]) the shading shows you where this seedbox ends, and the green cup, or what once was the green cup, begins. This is rather hard to understand, I know; but your teacher can make it clear to you with a real pear.

So it ought to surprise you no longer to learn that the apple and the pear are cousins.