Marie Carmichael Stopes

“ Now the sunflower we have just thought of is probably growing in a garden well looked after by a gardener, who sees that it gets all the light and water and just the kind of soil it needs. It is therefore protected and cared for to a certain extent, but who looks after the wild plants which manage to grow everywhere? These have not only their own lives to live, but by their own efforts must overcome difficulties which are not even felt by the cultivated ones. ”

“ Many and strange are the tales the fossil plants can tell us of the life in the forests when the coal was made, and just as, in the moors, only those moss-plants which were turned to stone will still be there after centuries have gone by, so it was in the old coal-forests that only the plants which were turned to stone remain to tell us their story to-day. ”

“ The long spit of sand-dune A protects the marshy land B from the strength of the waves, and here many salt-marsh plants grow. C is the open sea, which at full tide beats on the sandy shore so that no seaweeds or marsh-plants can grow on this side of the dune. ”

“ Many people do not realise that plants are alive. This mistake is due to the fact that plants are not so noisy and quick in their ways as animals, and therefore do not attract so much attention to themselves, their lives, and their occupations.
When we look at a sunflower, surrounded by its leaves and standing still and upright in the sunlight, we do not realise at first that it is doing work; we do not connect the idea of work with such a thing of beauty, but look on it as we should on a picture or a statue. ”

“ It is not like a woodland, for the plants are all so short that they do not shut out the view; hence on the moors there is a sense of space, and one can see all around the hillsides and plateaux clothed, though their form is not hidden, by their covering of plants. Let us see what are the characters of the plants which grow so lowly, and yet so thickly on these expanses of uncultivated ground. Almost the first which rises to [154] one’s mind is the heather, with its short, bent stem and many wiry branches. ”

“ We have now found that carbon forms a large part of the plant body, that plants cannot grow in air in which there is no carbonic acid gas, and that in getting the carbon from the carbonic acid gas, they split it up and give off the oxygen. So that we see that plants use the carbon in the air as well as the salts dissolved in the water of the soil as raw materials, with which they finally build up their food. ”

“ Perhaps it is this cool, sparkling appearance which attracts the insects to it, but when once a fly alights on one of the leaves, its fate is sealed. The tentacles with their sticky tips bend over one by one till the fly is quite covered in by them and cannot get away. It dies, and is digested by the juices given out by the leaf, which are very much like the digestive juices of animals. ”

“ The main thing to realise at the beginning of the study of plants is that they are living things, and therefore to try to discover the importance of the shape and arrangement of all their parts and their relation to the life of each plant as a whole. ”

“ The importance of the physical form of any place, however, does not only lie in the position of its lakes and streams and the size of its hills. The kind of rock, and nature of the soil covering the rocks, are very important, as well as the many other details of the land.
In England there are no very high mountains, so that you cannot study the effect of great heights on plants, but all the same England affords quite sufficient opportunity for the study of physical geography in its relation to plant-distribution. ”

“ Children generally know more about the behaviour [viii] of animals than that of plants (being themselves animals and frequently having kittens or other pets) ; hence, the parallels between the life-functions of plants and those of animals are pointed out whenever possible. Once the idea of their “livingness” has been fully realised, it is time to go on to the study of the details of the plant’s body, and then to the communities of plants which grow together. ”

“ We have noticed (Chapter VIII.) that plants are sensitive to light and bend towards it, that they feel heat and cold, and that the stem and root seem to know when they are growing in the right or wrong positions, and bend accordingly. We know that we ourselves and the animals recognize such things by the help of nerves which carry messages to the brain. But where is the brain in plants, and the nerves? No true nerves have been found in plants, and it seems as though different parts of the plant were specially sensitive without there being any “brains.” ”

“ In the winter, when the flow of food is very slow in the host, it is likely that the mistletoe does some of its own food building in its yellow-green leaves, which would be exposed to the full light, as the host’s leaves would have fallen away. The mistletoe has soft, white fruits which are scattered by birds, and as they are very sticky, they hold for some time on to the branch where they are dropped, and there the seedling sprouts and fastens itself on to the tissues of the host, growing every year with its growth. ”

“ As we see, the cotyledons shrivel up and are emptied of their store long before the plant is full grown. Remember that baby calves have milk for food, while old cows have grass. And when the store of food supplied in the seed is finished the older plants must find new supplies for themselves.
In growing seedlings you must always keep them well supplied with water, the soil or sawdust in which they grow must be kept moist. If you take one out of the sawdust and try to grow it only in the air, you will find that it soon dies. Even for the seedling the storehouse of food is not enough ”

“ In the full grown plant we also find much starch; in fact, nearly all the parts of plants which we eat as food contain large quantities of starch, as you can test with iodine in potatoes, turnips, radishes, oatmeal, flour, and a host of our other vegetable foods. This is also the case in many parts of plants which we do not generally use as food, for example, in the lily and tulip bulbs, underground stems of Solomon’s Seal, and the stems and leaves of most plants. So that we find that the food grains of starch are developed in grown plants, and are not only provided for the young ones. ”

“ A smaller plant, of somewhat similar habit, is the goosefoot. This has long, weak stems, which grow up amidst the other vegetation and so support themselves, while its leaves are arranged in whorls round the stem, and are narrow and rough, and help to keep the plant from slipping down. Notice also its fruits, how rough they are, and how they cling to everything. They are beautifully adapted to catch on to every passer-by, [148] whether man or animal, and so to get carried to a distance where the seeds may grow. ”

“ To find plants growing in desert places we do not need to go out of England, because from the point of view of the plant, one which is growing on a dry rock or on a patch of bare dry sand, is really growing in a little desert. For it the supply of water is the chief problem, even though we never get hot tropical sunshine in England. Look, for example, at the plants growing on the sand dunes which are very like deserts in appearance, and the plants on dry walls, or on the “screes” of broken rock at a hill foot; they are all growing in deserts. ”

“ Sometimes we find great trunks of trees standing petrified together in the positions in which they were growing, with their roots twining round one another, and entering the muddy soil on which they lived. Sometimes such tree-stumps stand up through the coal-beds and rocks which must have been deposited all round them (see fig. 153) . We find also leaves and stems, cones and seeds, in the stones, till we can build up completely the form and life history of several of the plants which were then living. But in all the wealth of material which has been found, no flowers have ever been discovered. ”

“ Not all leaves have their pores only on one side, but in nearly all plants the pores can open and shut. These facts show that transpiration is more than mere evaporation; it is a “life process,” that is, a physical process which is regulated by the structure of the living plant.
Transpiration is very important for plants, for it helps to keep the continual stream of water going through them, which brings with it the necessary food salts. Some plants cannot afford to let much water pass away, for they find it very hard indeed to get enough to keep them fresh ”

“ You know that very many flowers have sweet honey in them which the bees like, and come to collect, going from flower to flower to do so. When the bee settles on the flower it gets covered with the pollen dust, and then when it goes to the next flower and walks over it, it is almost sure to leave behind it some of the pollen sticking on the stigma. Of course, in this way also some pollen is lost, but insects are far more reliable than the wind. We now see the use of the bright coloured petals; they help to attract the bees to the flower. ”

“ So that in the end the plants and the physical nature of any place are so much in touch that it is almost impossible to do anything in the study of plant distribution without considering physical geography. ”

“ In certain places you see lakes, that is to say, the rocks and soil are so arranged that they form a basin and hold the water permanently there. Now in a lake, as you know, only water-plants will be growing, so that the presence of a fairly deep and constant lake makes it quite certain what kind of plants must grow in that spot. Imagine an earthquake or some slower earth-movement which is strong enough to change the rocks so that the water all runs away, and the result is that there will be dry land in the same spot where before was the lake. ”

“ The spores grow slowly when they come on to moist earth, but as their development takes a long time, you had better get some from a gardener which have already grown. As the spore grows, the one cell composing it divides and divides again, until there is formed a little filmy heart-shaped green structure called a prothallium (see fig. 129) , which is not in the least like a fern plant, for it is not more than a quarter of an inch across. It has no stem or leaves, and is only a thin layer of green cells, with a few root-hairs on the under side. ”

“ Perhaps there is no family of plants so easy to recognise as the ferns. It is nearly always a simple matter to know whether or not a plant is a fern, for although there are hundreds of different kinds, they all have the family characters plainly marked. ”

“ Others, which grow from seed every year, learn to sprout, flower, and fruit very quickly while there is some moisture, and they form well-protected seeds, which wait till next rainy season. One very curious desert plant has only two leaves, which last it the whole of its life, and which are very hard and leathery. There are endless varieties of things which the plants may do to protect themselves from being dried up, and we can only look at a few special examples. ”

“ Therefore this little book does not pretend so much to teach as to act as a guide along the road for those who desire to learn something about the plants around them; hence it points out how much they can easily see for themselves of the wonderful life and work of the silent plants.
It is planned for children, whose quick sympathies are more readily drawn towards the life of things than to the dry facts of morphology or classification. Its “Leitmotif” is therefore the story of life, and those of its activities which find expression in the plant world. ”

“ There is one very important point about the growth of plants which is strikingly different from the growth of animals. A young kitten has four legs, a head, and a tail, and as it grows to be a cat these only alter a little in shape and get larger and stronger; the number of its legs remains the same. A baby plant, on the other hand, has its little root and shoot with a few tiny leaves, but as it gets older these increase very much in number, till it may have many branches and thousands of leaves. ”

“ Now let us look at the structure of the ripe seeds [91] themselves, and see how they are fitted to go out alone into the world prepared to make a new plant. Seeds are all very much alike in the important points of their structure, although they vary much in the shape, size, and colour of their parts. We already know what beans are like from our careful study of them at the beginning of our work (see Chapter III.) , and beans show us particularly well all the important parts of a true seed, so that we may take them as being typical of one large family of flowering plants. ”

“ If you go along the lanes and in the gardens in the height of summer when it is hot and dry and the sun beats on the plants all day, you may see them beginning to wither for want of water. The roots are not able to find enough moisture in the soil to supply the leaves, which, being in the hot air, continue to transpire away the water resources of the plant, so that in the end each of its cells must suffer and the whole become limp and droop. ”

“ There are very many other kinds of fruits which all have special devices to make sure that their seeds are scattered, and all proper fruits have seeds in them. But, just as we found that some garden flowers are grown only for their beauty, and do not set any seed, so we find that some fruits are grown specially without any seeds, such as bananas and some oranges. Such fruits are the result of our liking to eat the soft, sweet pulp without the trouble of the seeds, but such fruits are of no use to the plant. ”

“ We find all through the plant-world that the structure of a plant depends very much on the kind of conditions under which it is living, and in the case of those growing in the water, it is [161] quite clear how the soft, air-filled stems are one result of their mode of life, and are well adapted to it. ”

“ As we noticed in comparing the leaves of the rose and cherry, some plants have very much more complicated leaves than others. Now such complicated structures do not develop on a plant all at once, as you can see if you examine a very young rose seedling. The first pair of leaves or cotyledons do not remain inside the seed as they do in the bean, but grow outside into the air and become green; they are quite simple leaves with smooth edges. ”

“ If you have never done this, try to pull up a large grass tuft or a hedge mustard, or any fairly big common plant, and you will find that often when it does not look very strong it may be extremely difficult to get it completely out of the soil, and even when it comes out you may find that you have not got it quite whole, for the finer branches of the root will generally break off. Now this shows us one of the uses of its roots to a plant; they keep it firmly in the soil, and prevent the wind from blowing it away, and people or animals from overturning it too easily. ”