Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

So they go to sleep. They open the channels from the leaves to the bulbs and the underground stems, and then all the living part of the leaves passes quickly down into the part that lies underground. There is only left the hard framework of the leaves. This is not alive; it never was alive. The living part of the leaf built it for a house to live and do its work in; now the house is empty: the living part has run down into the bulb or the underground stem. The part of the leaf that is left soon falls to pieces, as any old abandoned house will do. It falls on the ground; the rain soaks it, and it crumbles apart. It changes into food for other plants. It is not lost; it is taken up by other plants and again built into good plant material.

So it is with the seed-pods; when the seeds fall out, the part that is left behind is not alive. All the living part has gone out of the dry pods down into the bulbs or the underground stems; and the pods, too, crumble to pieces and make good food for other plants.

But the seeds are alive. They lie in the earth and wait for the time to come when they may wake up and make new plants with young bulbs or thick underground stems.

But how about the roses? Do they not die in the fall? Why, what are you thinking of? Do they not wake up next spring and cover their stems with leaves and flowers? Dead bushes could not do so.

You see how it is. The leaves work all summer long. They store up food in the roots and the stems. When the frost comes and pinches them, they know it is time to stop work and go to sleep for the winter. They have roots down in the ground. And now you know as well as I do how they manage it.

When the leaves have done their work and fed the flowers and the stems and the seeds, and when the stems and the roots are stored full of food, the leaves stop working. The green little cells that made them so bright all summer go away; the living part of the plant and the rich juices find their way into the roots and stems. Only the dead frames of the houses that the living parts of the leaves built in which to do their work are left. They are dry and lifeless; they never were alive. The living protoplasm has left them and unhinged them so that they soon fall off.

You know what becomes of them. They change into a great many substances. The little particles in them let go of each other and unite with other particles. In this way gases are made which go out into the air, but some parts are solid minerals which the roots took out of the earth to build the frame of the leaves. All these minerals fall back into the earth for the roots to use again next year.

So you see the leaf frame simply changes back again into the gases and minerals of which it had been made by the leaves and the roots.

As the protoplasm withdraws from the leaves of the rose bushes and of many other plants, particularly the trees, the resting time of the plant is announced by the most brilliant colors, the result of certain changes going on within the leaf. These bright colors that make our autumn woods so entrancing are not dependent upon the frost, as many think, but upon certain changes going on within the leaf itself as it ripens, just as fruit, when it ripens, takes on glowing colors. The bright autumn leaves are ripe leaves getting ready to fall. Why do you suppose leaves fall? It is better that they should; the sooner they fall, the sooner they will be converted into leaf mould to feed other plants. So the plants have a way of gathering their ripe harvest of leaves.