Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

Some parts of the plant need thick walls, like wood or bark, and these are made by the protoplasm from starch; they are not sugar, however, but a very tough, firm substance so unlike sugar that you wonder how it can be made of the same materials. But it is, for starch is the substance from which both are made.

There are other things in the plant besides starch, and there are things which are not made from starch; for instance, there are acids and minerals of different kinds and there is protoplasm, but the greater part of every green plant is formed from starch.

Some plants make more starch than they need at once, so they store it away for future use, just as people raise extra supplies of wheat and corn, and store them away until they want them.

The potato plant, for instance, stores a large quantity of starch in the potatoes underground. A potato is nearly all starch, and the sweet potato stores up sugar as well as starch in its underground parts.

The potatoes have a reason for this, and, if let alone, would use up the starch and sugar another season; but we do not let them alone, as you know. We too need starch, and so we dig up the potatoes and eat them instead of leaving them for the plant.

A great many plants store up starch in their seeds that the young plant may have food enough to start growing. All our grains do this. Wheat, rye, oats, barley, rice, corn, and all other grains are only the seeds of plants which have been stored full of starch. Peas and beans are also starch-filled seeds. Cabbages store food made from starch in their big thick leaves. Beets store sugar and other starch-food materials in their thick roots; so do carrots and parsnips and turnips. Onions store it in their bulb leaves underground.

You begin to see now how important starch is to our lives. Nearly all the vegetables and grains and fruits we eat are composed almost entirely of starch or the materials of starch. Even meat is made from starch, for what do the animals we kill for meat live on?

Why, plants of course, and chiefly the starch they find in plants.

So now we are just where we started,—we see we really do owe our lives to starch, and we owe starch to chlorophyll, so of course, we owe our lives to chlorophyll. I wonder if we shall think of this next time we look at the green leaves everywhere in the fields and woods.