Personality of plants

by Royal Dixon; Franklyn Everett Fitch

Certain plants like the Cacti seem to be able to get along without leaves, but thick, fleshy sections of stem perform all their functions. The Fungi and other parasites differ from most plants in that they have no chlorophyll for starch-making but live on the already elaborated tissue of living or dead neighbors.

When our seedling grows old enough, it marries and has a family. Among the higher plants, the sexes are quite distinct. There are such things as male plants and such things as female plants, but more often both sexes occur in the same individual and frequently in the same flowers. The Hop, Nettle, and Date Palm are one-sex plants. Maize has flowers of different sexes on the same stem.

Flowers are the reproductive organs. In the blossom of the Bean, the stamens are the male organs and the pistil is the female organ. The stamens produce dust-like pollen which is conveyed by the wind to the pistil of some other flower. Pollen grains deposited on the stigma of the pistil are held there by a sticky secretion until they can grow a long tube which travels down the style, eventually reaching and fertilizing the tiny ovules or eggs.

The ovules then develop into seeds and the pistil grows into a pod, on both of which the parent plant bends all its energies to give a good start in the world.

The cycle is now complete. We have another Bean and are back to where we started, ready for some other fellow to plant the new Bean and perform the experiment all over again.

This is the story in brief, but there are many other details. The different plants have invented and perfected all kinds of devices to secure the effective propagation of the race. The Hazel and the Grasses hang their stamens out in the wind in order that it may blow their pollen to some other plant, which is waiting with feathered pistil to catch it. Most garden plants depend on the insects to act as pollen carriers and display gorgeous flower-petals and nectar pits with which to attract them. Many plants aim to prevent self-fertilization by having the stamens and the pistil come to maturity at different times.

The plants go to great lengths to secure an advantageous distribution of their offspring. The nature of a plant is to live by growing. When it has reached a prescribed height, it must continue the process by producing new individuals to carry on the cycle. It gives its children a start in the world by providing them with wings, bladders, feathers, spikes, thorns, sticky secretions, submarines, boats, and kites, according to the method of travel they are to use. Sometimes the matured pistil or fruit is dispersed entire. Sometimes it opens and shoots the seeds out. The Violet and Oxalis act like veritable guns, so vigorously do they expel their seeds. There are seed-capsules, like those of the Primrose and Xanthium Spinosum, which open at the top so that only a high and efficient wind can dislodge the seeds.

The problem of food storage is an important one in plantdom. Annuals die when they have flowered and produced seed. Perennials wither but persist for a number of seasons and sometimes many years. Those whose stems or trunks are permanent withdraw their starch and chlorophyll into their cambium layer where it is safe from freezing. Those which die down to the ground each fall store up food material in underground stems and roots in sufficient amount to get a good start the following season. The Potato is an enlargement of the underground stem, but Carrots, Beets, and Turnips are bulbous roots. Hyacinths, Tulips, Daffodils, Snowdrops, Crocuses, and Buttercups all store food material in bulbs. Practically all wild flowers which come up early in the spring, feed upon the nutriment manufactured during the previous season.

Buds represent the foliage of the coming season. Each fall, trees and bushes prepare for next year’s growth by putting forth miniature shoots and leaves folded up in warm brown overcoats. At spring’s urgent call, the buds have merely to cast aside their coverings and step out into the warm sunlight. These buds really make a tree a community of individuals, because each one is capable of reproducing everything that has occurred on the plant up to that point. This is the principle on which grafting is carried on.

The most wonderful thing in all plant structure is the plant cell. There are anywhere from six thousand to twelve thousand of these living units to the square inch. In their restless, moving protoplasm lies the mystery of life—the directing energy which controls the plant’s activities and makes it a conscious, intelligent organism.