This seedbox with its case is what grows into the cherry. The white flower leaves, and the pins with dust boxes, fall away. In the cherry flower the green cup also disappears, instead of making the best part of the fruit, as it does with the apple and the pear. And the upper part of the seedbox pin withers off; but the seedbox below grows juicy and ripe and red, at least its outer case does.
Fig. 28
By the end of June you take out the long ladder and place it against the cherry tree. Seating yourself on one of its upper rungs, you swallow the outside of the shining little ball we call the cherry, letting the stony seedbox inside drop down upon the ground, where all ripe seeds belong.
The story of the plum and of the peach is almost the same as the story of the cherry. If you understand how the single seedbox of the cherry blossom turns into the cherry fruit, then you understand how the same thing happens with the single seedboxes of the plum and the peach blossom.
You know that in the flowers of the pear and the apple there were several of these pins without dust boxes; and although these were joined below into a single seedbox, this had separate compartments for the many seeds.
But the single seedboxes of the cherry, the plum, and the peach, have but one hollow. Usually in this hollow we find only one seed. So you see that these three fruits make a little group by themselves because of their great likeness to one another.
STILL MORE COUSINS
Fig. 29