Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

The cells made this food to nourish it, and it stays dry and hard until the rain moistens it in the spring, when it gets soft, like boiled starch, and is then ready for the little plant to use. When the ovules grow on one plant and the pollen comes from another, the seeds will contain the protoplasm of two different plants.

Now protoplasm remembers the plant it came from, and tries to make the new plant like it.

The ovule protoplasm tries to make the seed remember the plant it grows on, and the pollen protoplasm tries to make the pollen remember the plant it comes from.

So if the pollen comes from a plant bearing white flowers, it wants the seeds to grow into white-flowered plants. But if the ovules which fertilizes it grow on a pink-flowered plant, they try to make the seeds grow into pink-flowered plants. Now what happens? Very likely some of the flowers will be white and some of them pink. Some will take after the plant the pollen came from and some after the one the ovule came from. But sometimes the flowers will be a mixture of both plants and will be pink and white.

The ovule is the mother part of the plant and the pollen is the father part, and sometimes the seed-children take after the mother, sometimes after the father, and sometimes after both.

This is very strange and we cannot quite understand it. How can the protoplasm remember the exact shade and color of the plant it came from? How can it make seeds that grow into plants just like the old plants?

Protoplasm, you are a great, a very great mystery!

By knowing about pollen and ovules we are able to help form a great many lovely new flowers and fruits.

We get variegated flowers by fertilizing a flower of one color with pollen from a flower of another color.