Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

The tunic was sometimes confined at the waist by a girdle and sometimes let to hang loose.

We do not wear tunics, but we admire them very much in pictures, for they show the beautiful lines of the human form instead of concealing and altering them and making them ugly by ridiculous and tight-fitting clothes—very often tight in the wrong place, as is the case with modern garments.

But there are tunics worn in America, and they are never tight in the wrong place, though, truth to tell, they are not loose and flowing like the Roman or Greek tunic.

Perhaps you do not know that so commonplace an object as an onion wears a tunic, yet I assure you it is true. And the onion does not come from Rome or Greece,—that is, probably not. As far as we can find out, that homely vegetable first saw the light in the southwestern part of Asia, but it was known in Rome and Greece at a very early date, and lived in those places long before it found its way to us.

So it has seen more tunics than we have, if it is not a native Greek or Roman. Not that its garments look at all like a classical tunic!

Probably its bulb is said to be “tunicated,” or covered with tunics, because the different scales wrap about it like so many garments, and in a general way the word “tunic” is used to mean any garment.

The hyacinth, too, has a tunicated bulb. It came from the Levant, a country where people wear loose garments like the Greek and Roman tunic. I do not think, however, the bulbs are called “tunicated” because they came from the lands where tunics are worn. I think it is merely a name the botanists gave them for convenience to tell that they were covered by coats or scales.

What do you suppose a hyacinth tunic is, anyway? Merely a leaf scale! That is, instead of growing into a leaf it remained a scale, and some of the scales on a full-grown bulb are really the lower parts of the leaves. The upper part has fallen off and left the fleshy base to feed the plant.

Tulips have tunics too, and so have many other plants. And bulb tunics are a very convenient sort of garment to have, for they not only wrap up the plant, but feed it!

They answer the same purpose that tubers do on potato roots. You know what tubers are? They are just swollen portions of underground stems. When you eat your next potato remember it is a tuber, and that a tuber is merely a short piece of stem very much thickened. If you cannot believe this, look a potato in the eyes. There you will see the truth, for the eyes are merely the joints of the stem, and at each is a little bud that in the spring will start to grow, just like the buds on the branches of a tree. The bud grows at the expense of the material in the tuber, and the hyacinth grows at the expense of the food stored in the bulb. Of course, after a while green leaves form and make more food, but the very first food comes from the thick underground scales.