Norman Taylor

“ So inexorable is the plant’s demand for light, that these lower branches, in spite of being nearest the source of their food from the roots, are doomed to be killed. Nature plays no favorites and these lower branches, once the pride and support of the young tree, are ruthlessly dropped off when they can no longer play the game. This wholesale slaughter of lower branches in a forest, more complete than any pruning by man could ever be, gives us, if the story of the factory leaf has not already done so, some conception of the part played by light in the plant world. ”

“ Looking down from above on any small plant or bush, or from the sky on a forest, about all that can be seen are the thousands of leaves, all so arranged that it is as though some celestial photographer asked every one of them to so place themselves that they would all be “in the picture.” The competition between leaves on the same plant and between leaves on rival plants is infinitely keener than the friendly pushing of a crowd to get in a picture, and it lasts forever. ”

“ While the composition of chlorophyll is not surely known, iron is certainly one of its constituents, as plants deprived of iron lose their green color. It also is known to contain oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, but merely to catalog what we know about its make-up does not tell us that it is a living green substance and that sunshine sets it in motion. Just exactly how light acts on chlorophyll no one really knows; we merely know that it does so act and that the result is one of the marvelous secret processes of nature, perhaps like the secret of life itself forever hidden from man. ”

“ No feature of a landscape gives us more pleasure than its flowers, over which poets have sung and artists have painted their most charming pictures, even a musician has composed a very beautiful piano piece, “To a Water Lily.” But their true place in the scheme of nature has a deeper significance: the wonderful color and symmetry of their parts, the plan of their arrangement, their transformation into curious forms, like the Madagascar orchid, and hundreds of others—all these point to their supreme function, an act of self-sacrifice comparable only to the fall of a leaf when its task is done. ”

“ The actual process of fertilization, pregnancy, the forming of the fruit and later the seed, and the latter’s birth of a new plant, comprise one of the most fascinating of those provisions of nature which secure the perpetuation of the plant world. In the life history of even the commonest weed along the roadside there is this constant renewal of life by sexual reproduction, just as in animals and in man. In the chapter on “How Plants Produce Their Young” will be found some account of this supreme function of flowers, after which, as if their usefulness were over, they wither and perish. ”

“ Many volumes have been written on this subject, but all of them, intricate as the methods they describe nearly always are, merely confirm what we have already seen—that rather than submit to self-fertilization, plants will adopt almost undreamed-of expedients. Sometimes, as in the eelgrass and in the visits of nocturnal insects to those night-blooming flowers that carry on their matings in the glamour of moonlight or in the dusk of eventide, the drama, in the eyes of imaginative writers, is one of singular beauty and charm. ”

“ No one who has ever seen both our temperate forests and those in the tropics can fail to be impressed with the difference between them. Not only for the different plants in them, but for their wholly different aspect, tropical and temperate forests stand far apart as an expression of the forest covering the earth. Not all of us realize, however, that the heat of the tropics is not the deciding factor in the luxuriance of those dim jungles, and that a rainfall far above anything occurring in the United States is even more important. ”

“ We have already seen how the search for light will carry the slender rattan palms of India hundreds of feet to the topmost leaves of the forest. Individual plants, and, as we shall see later, whole forests make desperate efforts to get to the light. We know already, that the struggle for light is just as bitter as the struggle for food by roots. And finally if, as we have many times proved by experiments, plants die when grown in a dark room, what is it that light does for plants and how is a process carried on that everything leads us to think is of the greatest possible importance? ”

“ What our cotton fields of the South, the wheat and corn fields of the Middle West, the jute in India, and the coconut palm and sugar cane in the tropics have done to dictate the economic destiny of those regions is common knowledge. Hundreds of less important plants throughout the world contribute their quota to the huge debt that man owes to the plant world. Probably no other feature of plant life offers such attractions as the study of man’s uses of plants, which is known as Economic Botany, and for which our Government maintains a large staff of experts. ”

“ The secretion of this murderous liquid to lure the only creature that will visit such an offensively malodorous plant, which, without it, would very likely be itself destroyed by the foliage-eating snails, is a gruesome contrast to that happy flitting of butterflies which completes the fertilization of most flowers in equally effective but more pleasing fashion. ”

“ As the final stage in the development of all plants is their seed, with the dropping of which they bid good-by to their fellows, it is not perhaps remarkable that in the seed of all flowering plants is the germ for the new generation. To seeds which may be as small as the mustard, so often mentioned in the Bible, or as large as the coco de mer, or double coconut, from the Seychelles Islands, often fifty pounds or over, is intrusted by cunning nature the one final and most important act in the whole kingdom of the plant world. ”

“ Nothing dies harder than generally accepted delusions, particularly those regarding plant lore, and of all such incorrect impressions the one that a potato is a root, is the hardiest and most difficult to kill. Yet, the “eyes” of a potato give it away if one stops for a moment to reflect that the eyes are only buds and buds grow only on stems. That is one of the chief uses of stems—to support in the air the leaves and flowers that come from its buds, and no matter if the stem, as in the potato and many other plants, be ever so deeply buried their true stem nature cannot be mistaken. ”

“ It is protoplasm that forms the living tissue of all plants and animals; it is life itself. No one has ever succeeded in making any, notwithstanding that many learned men have tried for years. Its inclosure in the cell wall, its power of self-division and consequent multiplication of the units, make up those first things about which most of us can never know much, but the end of which we recognize in the beauty of plant life all about us. For only under the highest powers of the microscope may cells be seen and studied. ”

“ More cruel than any human society, these plant communities exist under conditions where only the individually strong survive, and only those societies are destined to reach their climax which can take advantage of every aid, quite without regard for severe losses or even death to the individual members of it. It is as if we poured into a crucible molten metals from many different sources, and after the incredible and relentless forces of manufacture had worked their magic upon them there resulted a product, purified and cleared of all dross. ”

“ Surely, nothing with which plants are provided is so important to them as this delicate membrane of the root hairs which, while allowing osmosis to act in a one-sided fashion, preserves to the plant the sugary liquid that alone makes the absorption of soil water possible.
As root hairs are very much alive and work constantly, they must be provided with air, without which no living thing can exist. And here, again, it seems as though nature, with almost uncanny foresight, had deliberately planned for this requirement of roots. ”

“ Mistakes are fatal, the forces of nature seem peculiarly relentless, and it is literally a case where many are called but few chosen. Of the untold millions of seeds produced each year few ever grow, yet out of this enormous wastage springs all that makes the earth not only habitable but the beautiful panorama of vegetation to which we are so accustomed that it is nearly taken for granted. ”

“ One thing is certain: that they have locked up in their hearts a bubble of air, even as we lock up in our souls a thought of desperate deliverance. It is as though they hesitated for a moment; then, with a magnificent effort, the finest, the most supernatural, that I know of in all the pageantry of the insects and the flowers, in order to rise to happiness, they deliberately break the bond that attaches them to life. ”

“ The writer once saw in Santo Domingo a railway cut through such a jungle and abandoned only two or three years before. Not a trace of the roadbed could be found, ties, rails, and switches all covered with a dense vegetation, and overhead the canopy of the forest had closed over the opening and was already sending down hundreds of adventitious roots that would complete the obliteration of man’s handiwork. Everywhere there is the evidence of vegetable life run riot, ever crowding and pushing to close up openings made by the crashing down of old trees or the artificial clearings of man. ”

“ Where, as in an oasis in the desert, water is locally plentiful a luxuriant vegetation springs up, and one of the most fertile parts of our Southwest was transformed from a desert by irrigation. Then, too, in many deserts there is a pronounced rainy season during which there is a marvelous development of showy flowering herbs that die down as rain ceases or becomes too slight, to wait for another opportunity to make the desert blossom into often gorgeous coloring. ”

“ Such suburbs as Brookline near Boston, Garden City and Morristown near New York, Guilford at Baltimore, Germantown near Philadelphia and many places on the Pacific Coast show what can be done to transform an otherwise indifferent landscape into a beauty spot. While these are on the whole the homes of the wealthy, money is not what has made them, for thousands of cottage gardens in England are just as beautiful and have been made by people who live a busy industrial life, but whose desire for beautiful surroundings makes them spend their brief leisure in tending their flowers. ”

“ With such a beautifully perfected mechanism for getting food it might seem as though all plants would be satisfied to lead that life of independence for which they are so splendidly equipped. Some of them, however, are like men in one respect: there seems to be no end to the chase after getting something for nothing. Those that stand on their own roots, get their food honestly, and take nothing for which they do not make prodigal returns, make up the great bulk of the vegetation of the earth. Their independence has dubbed them with the title ”

“ The fact of outstanding importance to everyone who really looks at most plants is that part of them are above ground and part below. This simple observation carries with it the recognition of a fundamental difference of plant structure, namely roots and stem. Most plants bear obvious leaves, and at some time in their life flowers, inevitably followed by fruits and seeds. The ideally perfect plant would consist, then, of root, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit, and seed. ”