Plants and their children

by Frances Theodora Parsons

I wish you would make for your teacher a list of all those that you can recall; or, better still, I should like you to collect as many as you possibly can, and bring them to your next class. If you cannot find the seeds just as they grow upon the plant, you may be able to get them prepared for use. A pinch of flour, for instance, would answer for wheat seeds, of oatmeal for oat seeds.

I have in mind a number of seeds that you can easily secure, of which I have not spoken; and it will be interesting at our next meeting to see which child in this class is able to make the best exhibition of seed food.

AN IMPATIENT PLANT BABY

Plant babies are not alike as to the time they take in finding their way out of the ripe seed shell into the world.

Certain seeds need only two or three days in which to bring forth their young. Perhaps we ourselves have seen the white tip of the bean rip open its shell the second or third day after being laid upon the moist cotton wool. But if we had not given this bean plant a good chance to grow, it would have kept alive and hearty inside its shell for a long time. This is not the case with all plants. Certain seeds need to be planted soon after they are ripe. If they are not, their baby plants die.

But usually seeds take such good care of their young, that they will live for a long time, even if shut up in a dark closet or a table drawer, instead of being comfortably laid away in the warm, moist earth.

Wonderful stories are told of seeds that have sprouted after having lain buried in some Egyptian tomb for thousands of years; but the people best fitted to judge of the truth of such stories do not believe them. There is no doubt, however, that some seeds keep their baby plants alive for many years.

Early in the summer the seeds of the red maple fall to the ground; and soon after this the young plants find their way up into the world above. Later in the year the sugar maple sheds its seeds. These lie sleeping in the earth through the winter. When the warm spring days come, the baby plants awake, and stretch themselves, and join the hundreds of other, just-awakened baby plants that are flocking into the world above. So you see that seeds of the same family have different habits in this matter.

There is one curious tree that lives in swamps along the seashore of hot countries. It is called the mangrove. The baby plants of this tree are so anxious to get out into the world, that they do not wait until the seeds in which they are hidden are set free from the mangrove fruit.