Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

We shall have to call these Sextus.

Sextus spread all over the sandy plains. Hardly any other plant was to be seen. The strong Sextus seeds sprouted and took the materials in the earth and the air, and the other seeds that happened to be blown among them did not grow; they changed into gases and minerals and other substances and helped the Sextus plants to grow.

One day some Sextus seeds blew upon good, rich, damp soil, and there they sprouted and grew. They had plenty of water, and there were no cattle to disturb them; so those with the fewest prickles were the best off, because they could use the food material to make larger flowers instead of prickles. So the plants with fewer prickles had larger flowers and better seeds, and these seeds sprouted and grew, and the others gave way before them. In the course of time these plants growing on the rich soil lost their prickles, and their flowers were large and very deep pink; in fact, some of them were a bright red.

These bright red flowers attracted the bees, and so they lived on and set seed. These we must call Septimus.

For some reason some of the seeds of the Septimus flowers developed unusually thrifty plants.

These plants had flowers with petals so full of sap they overlapped, and finally, just because they were so full of the growing spirit, the edges of the petals grew together.

Finally, the flowers with the edges grown together were the most successful. The tube their flowers made kept the nectar for the bees, and the bees liked to go into these red bells. You see what had happened: the flowers were no longer polypetalous. Their petals had grown together; they were gamopetalous. Their corollas formed snug tubes, something like a morning-glory corolla, for the bees.

We shall have to call these people Octamus.

And we will not follow them any farther, only be sure they kept on changing ever and ever. Whenever the seeds fell in a new soil, they had to change or die. The reason they could change so is because no two things are ever just alike, and out of a great many plants some might be fitted to survive in the new surroundings. These would live, and their descendants would be like them, but they would be different from their ancestors.

In some such way, no doubt, the many different kinds of flowers have come into existence.