Flowers and their friends

by Margaret Warner Morley

Some plants secrete wax which covers leaves or stems or fruits. Bayberry berries are covered with white wax, of which fragrant candles can be made.

Bayberry grows abundantly all along the New England coast, and friends of Thoreau used to make these fragrant candles as Christmas presents. Whenever Thoreau went to visit them, he insisted upon having a bayberry candle to go to bed by.

The bloom on cabbage leaves and on plums and other fruits is made of tiny scales of wax.

Bayberry.

Wax is a very good substance to keep the plant dry. You may be sure the plant knows this and often uses it about the stomata. You see, the object is to allow water to pass freely out of the stomata by evaporation, but not, as a rule, to pass into them. So the clever plants often have wax instead of hairs as a protection to the stomata. It would not do at all to let the stomata get closed up, so they are always protected in some way. Sometimes little projections grow out of the skin, close to the stomata. The raindrops fall upon these little knobs and stay there, instead of settling down into the stomata. You see, the pegs are very small, and when the rain falls on them there is a layer of air below them which the water cannot displace, and which prevents it from going any farther.

If you want to know just where the stomata are situated in a leaf, plunge it in water, then shake the drops off and notice what part of the leaf has not been wet. Wherever the leaf is dry, there are the stomata. In many plants, as, for instance, the jewelweed, it is quite impossible to wet the leaf. Soak it in water for an hour, and when you take it out it is dry! The parts that cannot be wet usually have a silvery, glistening appearance. Put the leaf in water and notice where it glistens; there are the stomata,—sometimes all over the under side of the leaf, sometimes in lines or patches, sometimes on both sides of the leaf.

Wax, gum, and resin are not the only things plant glands secrete. There are the glands in the flower cups that secrete nectar. In some plants this breaks through the delicate plant skin and runs into and fills up the little hollows or horns we call nectaries. In others the nectar is provided with stomata by means of which it can escape from the interior of the plant.

You may be surprised to learn that the flower is not the only part of the plant that can secrete nectar!

In some plants the stipules do it, and in some even the stems.