Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

I think flowers are “made of sugar and spice and everything nice.” At least, if it is not that, it is something very like it, as I have good reason to believe.

What flowers and all other parts of the plant are made of depends upon protoplasm; and if protoplasm can make sugar and spice and build up flowers that way, we should like to know it.

We do know about sugar and how the little green chlorophyll people run their starch factories in all the green parts of the plant,—under the skin of stems sometimes as well as of leaves, for wherever a stem is green, we may be sure chlorophyll is at work making starch in it. And we know how the protoplasm in the different cells changes the starch into sugar.

We know, too, how wood and other tough substances are made of starch.

But there is something else in plants as important as starch and very different,—the protoplasm. Protoplasm itself is not made entirely of starch; it requires materials not found in starch.

These materials are nitrogen, sulphur, and phosphorus.

Nitrogen is the most important, and this the plant gets chiefly through the roots.

Nitrogen is found in the earth combined with hydrogen and other substances. The protoplasm tears to pieces these nitrogenous substances which the roots suck up, and so enables the plant to take the nitrogen.

The other two substances which the protoplasm needs, sulphur and phosphorus, the plant gets partly from the air and partly from the earth.

Sulphuric acid exists in very small quantities in the air and goes in through the stomata, attracted, no doubt, by the protoplasm inside. But other sulphurous and phosphorous compounds are taken up by the roots.