Elsie jumped up with a little gurgle of joy and ran ahead of her mother to the 25 flower. This was better than playing “secret” with Rosie and Eva and the other girls, for their secrets were not real ones, they were just made up and they did not amount to very much after all, but this was a real one, kept up in earnest with the bees and flowers. And now she was to be let into it! Mrs. Edson bent over the bright yellow blossom, taking it gently in her fingers to prevent it from nodding so briskly in the breeze that they should be unable to examine it closely.
“You see, dear,” she said, pointing with a twig to the different parts as she named them, “right here, in the exact center of the blossom, is a bunch of green growing in the form of an oval, shaped somewhat like an egg with the smaller end upward.” 26
“Yes, oh, yes!” Elsie answered eagerly. “What is it, mamma?”
“Broadly speaking we will call it the ovary. I am not going to confuse you by giving you too many hard words at first, words like corolla, carpel, style, stigma, and the like. I shall name only two parts of the flower for you to remember just now, because only two are really necessary to be named at this point. So the name of this one is—what?”
“Ovary!” answered Elsie quickly.
“Yes, ovary! It is called so because it contains ovules, which are tiny seeds or eggs. That is the mother part of the plant.”
“The mother!” Elsie queried. “Why, mamma, is there a father too?”
“Yes, dearie, many plants have both a mother and a father part, which grow 27 near together in the same flower, while other plants have only a father part, and still others have only a mother part. This buttercup has both, has both the male and the female principle. The ovary is the female, and here, above it and surrounding it, you see a number of taller spires, yellow in color and each of them bearing a tiny enlargement, a kind of knob, at the top.”
“Yes, yes, but that—that can’t be the papa part! Is it, mamma?” she cried, examining the rather insignificant appearing spires dubiously. “They don’t look much like a—a papa!” she said in some disappointment. Her mother laughed.
“They certainly do not look much like a man-papa,” she returned, “but they form the papa part of the plant, nevertheless, and are truly the papas of the 28 baby buttercups. And their name is the second one that I wish you to remember from now on. It is stamen.”