Plant life

“ Are we not all wrong in adopting one degree, so to say, of plant life as the only fitting one to lay before the house? Is it well to devote the flower-bed to one type of vegetation only—low herbaceous vegetation—be that hardy or tender?... We have been so long accustomed to leave flower-beds raw, and to put a number of plants out every year, forming flat surfaces of colour, that no one even thinks of the higher and better way of filling them. ”

“ So far from being uniform, and unmarked by anything active, the lives of plants are full from beginning to end of the most curious and diversified phenomena. Not that they act knowingly, exercising consciousness and volition,—this has been the dream only of a few enthusiasts,—but taking one plant with another, the history of vegetable life is quite a romance, and scarcely inferior in wonderful circumstance to that of animals. ”

“ As we shall see in the chapter on the History of the Plant Kingdom, this alternation of generations, the absolute necessity of water in which to carry on the fertilization, and above all the ability of the male cells for free swimming in the water, are all landmarks in the development of plant life. ”

“ The Plant, in its botanical sense, includes every being which has vegetable life, from the loftiest tree which adorns our landscapes, to the humblest moss which grows on its stem, to the mould or fungus which attacks our provisions, or the green scum that floats on our ponds. ”

“ On looking closer into the matter, however, we see that plant-life as well as animal-life, is universally accompanied by certain manifestations of this power; and that plant-life could not otherwise continue. ”

“ In a plant, for instance, there is the combination of a growing point, a humus or pabulum that feeds it, and the stimuli, air, water, light, and all the "skiey influences" by which its [Pg 51] passive vitality is excited and sustained. We see plant life, by reason of these concurrent adaptations, swelling into leaf, stem, bud, corolla, and fruit, throughout all the brighter tribes of vegetable beauty that bloom apparent to the unassisted eye. And the like holds true respecting animals, but with increased variety and complication of conditions, made necessary by their higher mode of existence. ”

“ All that plant life has so far attained and all that it will attain to in future—perhaps also all that it might have attained to—must have been present in the plant-spirit of that original plant-germ. And it is through the working out—the realising—of this ideal which actuated that plant-spirit, and through the response which this spirit made to the stimulus of its surroundings that all the wonderful development of plant life has taken place. The plant-spirit had to keep within the lines of plant life ”

“ Thirdly, from the fact that plant-life alone has the power of subsisting on inorganic matter, and that plants furnish all the nourishment of animals, we may fairly infer that the life of the plant preceded that of the animal. ”

“ The extraordinary efforts that the plant world makes to keep all but a minute fraction of the earth clothed with some sort of vegetation we have seen in the pages just turned. No other phase of the study of plant life is so replete with interest as plant distribution. ”

“ Form, color, the secretion of sweetish nectar, the night or day blooming of different kinds of flowers, every device that will make fertilization certain, by the flower itself, by insects, or even by the wind, is used in such prodigal fashion, that we come to see the importance of it to all plants only by a realization of the complexity of it and the provisions against its failure. ”

“ If it is allowable to assume that the prevalence of physical and chemical conditions similar to those which in bygone ages supported an abundant vegetation on our globe, would{14} produce plant life on another world, then we may imagine a luxuriant vegetation on Venus. ”

“ All the delicate mechanism of food getting and the manufacture of starch; the fertilization of flowers by insects, the wind or water; the response to changing light and to climate—these and scores of other activities of plants have resulted in the present vegetation of the world being what it is. ”

“ But, after the ground is freed from its icy envelope, everything starts into life, and grows with the most astonishing rapidity. A plant will spring up, grow two or three feet high perhaps, bud, blossom, and bear fruit in the time our plants of the temperate zone will be producing a foot or so of stalk and leaves. ”

“ An heteronomous becoming is to be traced back to the becoming of the cause which produces it. The plant vegetates, and its vegetation 123 is a development, a becoming. But could it grow without the rays of the sun, the moisture of the soil? The plant vegetates in consequence of its nature, that nature which in accord with our ordinary way of considering plant life it possessed from the time it was a green blade just sprouting ”

“ Not only among these present-day plants, but all through the story of the development of the plant kingdom, we have been reading and writing of the changes of form and structure, some of which have been of far-reaching consequences. It is clear enough that if new types of vegetation and different races of plants have come into being and so modified the complexion of the plant kingdom, those changes must have first arisen in individuals which had within them some capacity for change, and furthermore the ability to use the change to their advantage. ”

“ From the architecture of their outer characteristics, which takes up the first chapter, we have gone step by step into the story of what goes on within the plant, and how it reproduces its kind. These actions or behavior of plants have resulted in many things of great practical importance as well as being of absorbing interest in themselves. What some of these results have been, we see reflected in the uses of plants to man, in the history of their development, and, most of all, in the way they are distributed over the earth to-day. ”

“ So the inexorable and relentless processes of nature work over the materials found in these plant communities, the results of which are the dominant types of vegetation in the world to-day. With this understanding of the part they play in plant distribution we may now consider a few of the most widely recognized plant societies and see how they have affected the vegetation, sometimes even the history of the regions in which they are found. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Or better yet my assistants here, Josephine, Miriam and Ethel, will do the trick.
"A plant really goes through much the same operations in life as does an animal. Only to be sure, these operations are performed in a rather different way. A plant has a digestive, or feeding, system, a breathing apparatus, the power to rid itself of waste and to make seed; it moves, and it grows, too. Philip looked a bit skeptical when I said it moves. Well, it does. Of course, a plant does not walk about, and move from spot to spot. But a plant can and does move. Why it can turn itself around back to, even. ”

“ Now to go to the other signs of life. I think you will hardly need to do any special experiment to show that seedlings grow into big plants, you must have seen it so often for yourself in the woods and fields and gardens. ”

“ Among plants, as distinguished generally from animals by the production and abundant use of chlorophyll and of cellulose, we have still existing on the Earth a range of forms extending from almost the most primitive organism that we can imagine up to the splendid Seed Plant, specialized in a hundred ways. ”

“ This home economy of plants, or how they meet the environment and each other, is called Plant Ecology, a phase of botany now much studied, for it tells us more directly than most other plant research what the actual response to various factors of the environment may be. Just as plant distribution is the reflection of many, usually widely operating forces, so ecology narrows down to individual plants or groups of them the impact of the immediately surrounding conditions upon vegetation. ”

“ However, we do not need to go so far to find very many different kinds of roots, and if you examine carefully those of the plants growing in our woods and lanes, you will find what a number of extra pieces of work they can do, in addition to their two chief duties of drawing in water from the soil, and holding the plant in its position in the earth. ”

“ How plants are distributed, whether as forest or prairie or thickets or what not, depends upon the response of individual plants and their organs to the conditions about them. The type of vegetation in different parts of the world has been dictated by the success of the survivors in meeting existing conditions and of having met them in the past. ”

“ Apart from such special cases, the general dependence of animals upon plants is obvious, and is by no means confined to food-supply. Animals of all grades, from human beings to Caddis Worms, construct houses of vegetable materials; trees are the chosen home of large sections of our fauna, and the herbs of the field are the world for millions of tiny beings. ”

“ Before we trespass on the domains of arboriculture, horticulture, or agriculture, under which heads the cultivation of useful or ornamental plants divides itself, some consideration is required of those plants which, quasi-wild, are usually included in accounts of the vegetation under the head of aliens, denizens, colonists, and so forth. ”

“ The plant must have good soil, water and air and sun, care and pruning, in order to grow, but it grows of itself, gains strength by proper nourishment. The [Pg 84] aggregation of material about the plant does not constitute its growth. The plant must assimilate; the juices of life must flow through it. ”

“ They succeed in a wonderful way, and some plants manage to grow under very difficult conditions, even in places where they get no water for months under a burning sun, or in forests where the overshadowing trees cut off the light and rain, or under the water where they get no direct air. They have to do all the usual work of plants, and at the same time struggle against the hardships of their surroundings. ”

“ All the parts of plants have some special life-work, just as we have legs and arms for different purposes, and every part is formed in some way to suit the needs of the plant and help it to get on well in its home. ”

“ Plants grown in the house inevitably turn toward the windows, even plants growing against a wall turn their leaves away from it—nowhere can one find living green things that do not find the light as surely and persistently as men try to get their food or their mates. ”

“ So that you see, even if you had no plants but those in the hedges and ditches to study in their homes, yet you could manage to find many examples of living plants which are trying to fit themselves to their ever-changing surroundings. ”

“ For the present purpose we may take our typical plant as consisting of subterranean roots and aerial leaves on the one hand, and aerial flowers on the other—the roots and leaves concerned especially with carrying on the life of the individual, the flowers with perpetuating the race. ”

“ Whether buried in the ground, and producing, almost by stealth, buds that develop into mature plants, or thrusting leaves to the utmost limits of their reach, or climbing by an intricately varied mechanism, or changing their character to suit desert conditions, or floating on the water—it matters not. ”

“ The truth is, we have to remember, as emphasized in a previous chapter, that the world is already densely populated by plants, all of which survive by reason of their being specially fitted for their several habitats. ”

“ Hundreds of sports or mutants have been recognized and isolated, so that many of our most valuable garden plants have arisen through this ability of plants to vary in often sudden and rather startling degree. ”

“ And again, bethink you, good, easy-going human being, how great are the difficulties she has to contend with, especially in the case of the plant creation. Put yourself in the orchid’s place, and you will see the reason. For remember how absolutely fixed and limited are plants, each rooted to the soil in a single small spot, each tied by strict conditions of rock, and water-supply, and air, and wind, and sun, and climate, from which none can escape, try they all their hardest. ”

“ For, to continue the simile I have borrowed from the vegetable kingdom, is it not almost the same thing, whether we live successively to witness the germination, blooming, foliage, fecundity, fading, withering and corruption of a plant, or whether a vast number of specimens, selected from every stage through which the plant passes in the course of its existence, be brought at once to our view? ”

“ Now, such beauty could be obtained without any further aid from other plants; and in many cases it might be desirable to consider the trees and shrubs and their effect only, and let the turf spread in among them; but we have the privilege of adding to this beautiful tree and shrub life another world of beauty—the bulbs and herbaceous plants, and innumerable beautiful things which go to form the ground flora, so to say, of northern and temperate countries, and which light up the world with loveliness in meadow or copse, or wood or alpine pasture in the flowering season. ”

“ As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications. ”