Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

The Pistil.

Here is its picture, and you may look at it as carefully as you please. The knob at the top is called the stigma, the long, slender part is called the style, and the round bottom the ovary.

If you look over all the vine you will make a discovery. You will find a great many of these pistils in different stages of growth. When the flower cup first falls off, the pistil is very small and has its style and stigma. Then the style and stigma fall, and only the ovary remains. This grows larger and plumper, and you tell me it is the seed-pod, and is full of seeds. You are right about that; it is the seed-pod, and the pistil is the part where the seeds grow.

So now you see how very important it is, and I would advise you to take another look at it.

If there were no seeds there could be no more plants, so the growth of the seed is a matter of great importance.

When the seed first begins to form it is tiny and soft and delicate. It is attached to the inside of the ovary, and we do not then call it a seed, but an ovule. The word “ovule” means “little egg,” and the ovules are really the eggs of the plant, as you will agree if you think a moment.

If all goes well, the tiny, soft ovule becomes a large, hard seed. But it cannot do this alone; it needs help. Probably you never could guess what helps it, so I will tell you at once: it is the pollen.

If a pollen grain can unite with an ovule, the two thus joined together can grow into a seed. So you see the flower does not provide pollen for the use of the bee alone. It makes it for its own seed-children.

But the bee is the messenger that carries the pollen to the ovule. You see the pollen grain of our morning-glory lies in the anther below the stigma, and it must reach the stigma so as to find its way down to the ovary. Just how all this comes about you will know later; only now remember that the pollen must get to the stigma, and that the bee puts it there. Not on purpose, though. The bee collects pollen for her own use, but in doing so touches the stigma with her pollen-covered body, and some of the pollen grains stick to the stigma instead of remaining on the bee.

When the pistil is ripe, the stigma is sticky and holds fast the pollen grains that touch it. The union of ovule and pollen is called fertilization, and by flying about from flower to flower the insects carry pollen from one flower to another, and thus fertilize the plants.