Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

These stronger plants held their own, you may be sure, and at last there was more of them than of the small-flowered plants. It was well for them this was so, for there came several bad seasons when nothing was just right for these plants. It was cold and stormy, and only the very strongest lived through it. But they managed to survive, and their flowers were large and showy.

All the weaker plants with smaller flowers were killed out, and only these large-flowered ones remained. They were very different from their ancestors the marsh plants, and we shall have to call them Tertius.

One day some of the seeds of Tertius were blown into a new kind of soil; they sucked up the juices of this new soil, and lo! some of their flowers opened white instead of yellow. It so happened that the white-flowered plants were stronger than the others. The bees liked them, too; for, being so strong and full of sap, they made plenty of honey. So these white-flowered ones increased in numbers very greatly. At last only the white ones could be found; the yellow ones had gradually given way before them until no yellow ones were left.

So we will call the white-flowered people Quartus.

Quartus lived a long time, each year bearing seeds, the strongest and best of which grew up and bore flowers.

One day some of Quartus’ seeds were blown into a hot, sandy place; this almost killed them, but some of them managed to grow.

Their leaves were smaller and stiffer than ever before, but they had a great many of them, and their flowers were large and white. They grew to like the sandy soil, and what they got from it changed their sap in some way so their petals were delicately tinged with pink. The bees liked these pink flowers; perhaps their honey was a little richer; perhaps they could see them better. However that may be, the bees almost deserted the white-blossomed plants and visited the pink ones. So the white flowers set few seeds and the pink flowers many. When the seeds sprouted, the pink ones were the strongest, because in their change of color there was somehow added a change in strength; they were stronger than the white flowers. They grew fast and took the materials from the earth and the air; and when the white flowers saw this, they said, “It is their turn now,” so they changed into gases and minerals and other things and helped the pink flowers to grow.

Soon there were no more white flowers to be seen; they had stopped growing, and only the pink ones kept on, so we shall have to call these pink flowers Quintus.

But a great danger threatened Quintus. Cows and goats and sheep bit off their leaves. They ate so much of them that many plants were killed outright. Only the stiffest and hardest were left to blossom and set seed. The seeds of these plants with the stiff leaves and stems grew into other stiff-stemmed and stiff-leaved plants. The cattle browsed the tenderest of these and again left the stiffest. This went on for many years, the plants growing stiffer and harder each year. Some of them got so stiff and hard that they threw out prickles all over their stems.

These prickly ones were not eaten, and in time you would have found them grown into woody bushes with prickly stems.