Plant world

“ In the latter are all those unicellular plants that reproduce themselves by simple division of the cell, and also those flowering plants that either naturally, as in life plant, or by the gardener’s art of making cuttings, produce new plants quite without the intervention of the sexes. Whether it be sexual or asexual, nature has more than fulfilled its obligation to the plant world in providing it opportunities for self-renewal. ”

“ Thus the whole of the vegetable world, including rigid trees perceive the changes in their environment and respond to them by unmistakable signals. They thrill under light and become depressed by darkness; the warmth of summer and frost of winter, drought and rain, these and many other happenings leave a subtle impression on the life of the plant. By invention of apparatus of extreme delicacy, it is possible to make the plant itself write down the history of its own experience in a hieroglyphic which it is possible to decipher. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What are they doing, and are they of any use?
169 The general scheme of Nature is to cover the whole world with green, so that every ray of sunlight may find a working leaf or green frond ready to welcome it and use it. Nature abhors bare rock, barren sand, and empty water, and never ceases to try to bring it under that beautiful covering of green plants and active vegetable life which supports both man and animals. ”

“ 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 the habits of plants, their growth requirements, their stature, and particularly their colors are so various that, with the best will in the world, a garden enthusiast without some knowledge of these things will get a wholly disappointing result. Certain plants will grow in some sections of the country, but fail in others; some flower in the south, but will not do so in the north, and a few set seeds in certain places, but never do in less favored regions. ”

“ Living in a plant-infested world as we are elected to do, eating plants, wearing their [351] products, utilizing them in all our arts, buying and selling them daily, unable to get through an hour of the day without being constantly reminded of our entire dependence upon the members of the vegetable kingdom, what is more natural than that we should wish to know them? To know their names is not the end and aim of plant study. ”

“ Every green plant is a laboratory in which, so long as the sun shines upon it, materials furnished by the mineral world, gases, water, saline compounds, are worked up into those foodstuffs without which animal life cannot be carried on. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the span of my own lifetime I have observed such wondrous progress in plant evolution that I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The types that lay latent in the oldest vegetation have simply been separated and perfected; progressive development has been gradually led along a series of intricate but constantly diverging lines that lead out and up, and finally terminate in the endless graded ranks and profuse varieties which constitute the grand flora—the grandest the world has ever seen—that annually buds and blooms, and bears its wealth of leaf and fruit for you and me, provided only we appreciate it all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are a change and relief, in their soothing monotony and simple plant life, from the lush and variegated flower fields, the dense and hostile chaparral thickets, the dark forests of great trees, and the miles of artificial plantations of orchards and vines. ”

“ Flowers are the most exquisitely delicate in their texture of all forms in the vegetable kingdom. Look at the petals of this one. Could anything be softer or finer? The leaf, the bark, and the wood of the plant are all coarse, in comparison to the flower. Now, as nothing is made in vain, there must be some reason for this. The leaves and bark, as well as wood, of plants, all have vessels through which sap flows, and this sap nourishes, sustains, and builds up the plant, as our blood does our bodies. But the whole effort of the plant is to reproduce itself ”

“ 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. ”

“ With this idea well fixed in your mind, you will easily see that when you know the country from which a plant has come, a knowledge of the physical geography of that country will be helpful in knowing how to make the plant happy and prosperous.
We must also make the plant comfortable in the soil. There is great difference in what plants require to make them comfortable. Some, like thistles or mullein or ragweed, will thrive on almost any soil and are no more exacting as to food than a goat or a mule; but other plants are as notional as children reared in the lap of luxury. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He can note the plant from its cradle to its grave; can watch its struggles for existence, its habits, its migrations, its variatlons; can study its atmospheric and entomological economics; can speculate on its relations to the past, or experiment on its utility to man. It would be in vain to attempt to enumerate all the points about which a lover of vegetable nature can learn and report something new. Botany, like every other science, far from being exhausted, is ever widening its field. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Each part of a plant does work, and is fitted, by means of certain structures, to do that work. It is because of these adaptations that living things are able to do their work within their particular environment.
Plants and Animals and their Natural Environment.—Those of us who have tried to keep potted plants in the schoolroom know how difficult it is to keep them healthy. Dust, foreign gases in the air, lack of moisture, and other causes make the artificial environment in which they are placed unsuitable for them. ”

“ The latter, when duly fertilized by being brought into contact with the "pollen" of the stamens, become "seeds," and are capable of growing up, when planted, into new plants. Now, the botanist will inform us that it is a matter of common experience to find some individual plants of a species with well-developed petals or blossoms, and other individuals of the same species with petals in a rudimentary condition, thus proving that the production of imperfect parts in flowers occurs as an ordinary event under our own eyes, and under the common conditions of plant-life. ”

“ With this plant the whole world would seem rich though none other existed. ”

“ And on the plant as it grows, and as a perfect whole, chemistry expends entire and most gifted intellectual lives. Of what the plant consists, whence it draws its subsistence, how it takes it in—in what form, in what quantity, at what period of the day—how the air feeds it, how the soil sustains it, why it grows well here and badly there—what are the nature, composition, action, and special influences of manures—where and when, and of what kind, they should be applied to the plant—how this or that effect is to be produced by them, and this or that defect remedied. ”

“ There are botanists among them, equally familiar with either the Linnaean or the Natural system, who know the name and habitat of every plant within a day's walk from their dwellings; who steal the holiday of a day or two when any particular plant should be in flower, and tying up their simple food in their pocket-handkerchiefs, set off with single purpose to fetch home the humble-looking weed. ”

“ In fact, one has only to watch the Sun-Flower follow the orb of day across the heavens to realize that there must be something vital in sunlight for the plants. What interests us is that they have the instinct or the knowledge to so present their surfaces to the light that they receive a maximum benefit from its influences. From the aristocratic indoor potted plant to the wild trees and shrubs on the edge of a thicket, we notice a vigorous straining toward the light. ”

“ Accordingly the tree lives first for itself, accomplishing this object by covering itself with buds that develop into branches covered with leaves. It is indeed on the leaves that the fundamental principles of the plant’s life are based; it is in their substance that, with the sun’s help, the descending sap is elaborated, this sap being the nutritive fluid, the life-blood as it were, of the vegetable organism. The propagation of the species comes next in importance. This duty devolves on the flower-buds or those that blossom and produce fruit, in the center of which are the seeds. ”