Vivarium

“ Life in the vivarium supplies us with some other facts which are not undeserving of the commentator’s attention. We have said that, when fresh provisions are supplied, the Sacred Beetles who are roaming about come running up eagerly to the smoking fare. ”

“ The rearer of insects will frequently experience difficulty in carrying his pupæ through the winter, and, even though ordinary precautions are taken, the mortality will frequently amount to 50 per cent of the [120] specimens. Mr. H. Bakhaus, of Leipzig, thus describes a device which is substantially the base of the vivarium shown on page 114.
“The base consists of a round plate of strong zinc, with two vertical rims, an inch high, placed one within the other, an inch apart, and soldered to the basal plate so that the outer one is water-tight. ”

“ Biology has in addition a separate building as a vivarium for the study of living plants and animals. The aquaria have both sea and fresh water, and there is provision for insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. ”

“ There must, as in the wind-carried pollen, be a tremendous wastage, yet sufficient quantities of it do fertilize the females, particularly in the ditch grass, which fruits very freely.
Whether it be any of the various contrivances for insect fertilization, or by the winds, or, as in the eelgrass, by the water, the climax of the flower’s life is always reached in this act. For all annuals the plants, also, begin to die down then, a process that is completed with the production of seed, which is, of course, the object of all those varied modes of fertilization. ”

“ Plants must be collected both in flower and in fruit, with the underground parts as perfect as may be. Seedlings and rosettes should be included whenever present. In pressing, one or two leaves should be arranged with the lower side uppermost to admit of the ready comparison of both surfaces. Opened flowers are valuable for flower biology, while seeds and fruits are desirable for showing migration contrivances. The ferns, mosses, and lichens of the formation should be fully represented, together with the more important fungi and algae. ”

“ Among the erect-growing plants that produce flowers, Lobelia Erinus, sweet alyssum, petunias, oxalis, and various geraniums are to be recommended. Among foliage plants such things as coleus, dusty miller, begonia, and some geraniums are adaptable.
Aquarium.
A pleasant adjunct to a window-garden, living room, or conservatory, is a large glass globe or glass box containing water, in which plants and animals are living and growing. A solid glass tank or globe is better than a box with glass sides, because it does not leak, but the box must be used if one wants a large aquarium. ”

“ It so happens, however, that a very choice selection may be made of plants equally to be desired for their curious structure, interesting history, and high floral beauty, and that such a selection may be grown to perfection in any greenhouse with the aid of a little more care than such things as bedding plants require. The best place for a few of these plants is in a compartment shut in by means of a glass screen at the warmest end of a house that is heated during winter sufficient for the safe keeping of a good collection of miscellaneous greenhouse plants. ”

“ At right there is no dividing wall save large plants and vines, a narrow aisle between shelves of plants leads off.
This is not a greenhouse where plants are being displayed, nor the usual workshop for the growing of them, but a place for experiment with plants, a laboratory.
At the back grows a strange vine. It is arresting rather than beautiful. It creeps along the low wall, and one branch gets a little way up the glass. ”

“ Bedding plants should be got into small pots as fast as they make good roots in the borders, or can be spared from the decorative grounds, if worth keeping. Keep the houses gay with balsams, cockscombs, fuchsias, liliums, gladioli, coleus, amaranthus bicolor, heliotropes, and plants with fine foliage. Wherever wormcasts are seen in pots, turn out the balls, and the worms can then be picked out with a stick. Sometimes a dose of manure-water will cause the worms to struggle up to the surface. ”

“ As only a comparatively small number of plants can reproduce by this method, it is obvious that something more must be provided to secure new generations of plants. Flowers, and the fruits and seeds which inevitably follow them, do this. All plants, with some exceptions to be noted later, produce flowers at some time in their life. In the case of the century plant, only once, after which they die. But except for ferns, mushrooms, seaweed, yeast, bacteria, and some other forms of so-called flowerless plants, a flower or blossom is to be found at some stage in the life of all plants. ”

“ The study of the behaviour of the floating seed or fruit leads us to the borderland of vivipary. In the scale of the germinative capacity of plants it is possible to arrange a continuous series that commencing with the mangroves, where germination takes place on the tree, ends with those numerous inland plants where seeds are liberated in an immature condition. ”

“ Only the head and six prolegs of the occupant ever emerge from its case. Dragging its house along upon the plant, it attaches the open mouth of the sack close to the green seed-pod, after which the shell is gnawed through at the point of contact, and the young seeds devoured at pleasure, when a new journey is made to the next capsule, and thus until the maturity of the larva. ”

“ In garden flowers, also, we see most striking results of continuous selection. By taking advantage of the tendency of stamens and carpels to change occasionally into petals, and of petals to increase in number, “double flowers” have been effected. When “doubling” is complete—that is, when the conversion into petals is thorough—no seed can of course be produced, and the plants must be propagated by cuttings. Different other slight natural variations, exaggerated by selection and cultivation, have been the source of innumerable “varieties” in our gardens. ”

“ Has the brilliant, strong-scented plant no ulterior motive in thus attracting their attention at this particular time? Surely! Robins, flickers, and downy woodpeckers, chewinks and rose-breasted grosbeaks, among other feathered agents, may be detected in the act of gormandizing on the fruit, whose undigested seeds they will disperse far and wide. Their droppings form the best of fertilizers for young seedlings; therefore the plants which depend on birds to distribute seeds, as most berry-bearers do, send their children abroad to found new colonies, well equipped for a vigorous start in life. ”

“ The difficulty is very often to know where to draw the line. Probably no flowering plant is quite independent of the labour and work of its neighbours. As we have tried to show in another chapter, a long preliminary cultivation by bacteria, lichens, and mosses is required before flowering plants can develop on bare rock. That is also necessary in all cases where the soil is mineral or inorganic, without any organic dust or fragments of vegetable or animal matter. Bacteria must always begin the work by preparing nitrates and other salts. ”

“ Every pool, every soil, swarms with bacteria, the lowliest form of life—organisms exceedingly minute, exceedingly simple, and capable of existing under highly diverse conditions both physical and chemical. Thence we can trace an irregular ascending scale through the Fungi, the Algæ, Mosses, Horsetails, Ferns, and Club-mosses, to the Conifers, and on to the highest of the Seed Plants, which exceed in their beauty of structure and complicated life anything that has gone before them. ”

“ There are to be found hundreds of plants of the most beautiful character and the most hardy constitution, which it is difficult to keep alive in the open border, not because our winters are too cold, but because they are too damp and variable. Many of these are known as “frame plants,” and others are grown on rockeries, and others again are popular bedders, and a considerable number are varieties that puzzle their possessors until they are taken into an unheated airy greenhouse, and there they thrive in a surprising manner. ”

“ Perhaps the best preventive is to plant so much seed, and to plant over so often, that although the insects do their worst, plenty of good plants survive. This has usually been my method. When the striped bug disappears, and the plants are four or five inches high, I thin out to four plants in the hill. When they come into bearing, pick off all the fruit fit for use, whether you want it or not. If many are allowed to become yellow and go to seed, the growth and productiveness of the vines are checked. The Early White Spine and Extra Long White Spine are all the varieties needed for the table. ”

“ I am afraid it has been rather a difficult history to follow step by step, and yet it is perfectly clear when once we master the succession of growths. Starting from a spore, the thread-mass or protonema gives rise to the moss-stems forming the dense green carpet, then the green flowers on some of the leaf-stems give rise to a plant-egg, which roots itself in the stem, and grows into a perfect plant without leaves, bearing merely the urn in which fresh spores are formed, and so the round goes on from year to year. ”

“ Every season should supply new flowers to the conservatory. In the spring, potted bulbs will make a gay beginning, and if orchids are grown in the stoves the bulbs will be followed closely by some of the most resplendent of the family. As the season advances the greenhouse will supply pelargoniums, heaths, herbaceous calceolarias, and specimen petunias, and in autumn the pits will prove their usefulness by providing a glorious display of chrysanthemums. ”

“ Bentham informs me that in the South of France some of the flowers on the vine do not fully open and yet set fruit; and I hear from two experienced gardeners that this is the case with the vine in our hothouses; but as the flowers do not appear to be completely closed it would be imprudent to consider them as cleistogamic. The flowers of some aquatic and marsh plants, for instance of Ranunculus aquatalis, Alisma natans, Subularia, Illecebrum, Menyanthes, and Euryale, remain closely shut as long as they are submerged, and in this condition fertilise themselves. ”

“ Slides in each tank afford means of shutting off the water allowing each house to be worked independently. The centre of house is occupied by an earth bed in which the plants (after becoming well rooted in the small pots, to which they are first transferred from the cutting pots) are carefully transplanted and will form large and vigorous vines by the end of the season. ”

“ Follow up the vines for fifty feet and you meet with the parasites in countless variety. They are grouped, massed and interwoven; they cling to the trees wherever there is a chance, and feed on the moist air. There are hundreds of cord-like air-roots which dangle in the air, and others send a branch down to mother earth for sustenance. Delicate orchids bloom among the other plants on the branches. ”

“ When the resources of the garden have been exhausted, go into the nearest lanes and again search the grass and at the roots of plants, especially the nettles which grow beside ditches and in damp places; hunt amongst the dead leaves in plantations, and literally leave no stone unturned. All the apparatus it is necessary to take on these excursions consists of a few small match or pill-boxes in which to carry home the specimens; a pair of forceps to pick up the smaller ones, or to get them out of cracks ”

“ But at present the beautiful red weeds, in general, are difficult of cultivation, 44and when they begin to exhibit spots of orange—a vegetable plague-spot not to be mistaken—it is a symptom of decay which should at once cause their removal from the Aquarium, before their decomposition leads to further mischief. ”

“ As a rule, these vines receive little cultivation, are unpruned and are given no care of any kind; but even under neglect they produce large crops. The vines are almost immune to mildew, rot, phylloxera, or other fungal or insect pests; they give not only an abundance of fruit but on arbors and trellises are much prized for their shade and beauty. ”

“ There is every reason to believe that vines are rendered less susceptible to the disease by a system of pruning and training that will produce long canes and give them as nearly as possible their natural growth. Numerous instances are on record, and have come under my notice, of thrifty vines grown upon trees, or upon houses, with scarcely any pruning, and generally in firm, compact soil; while in the same neighborhood the same kinds of vines, in open culture, have been sickly or have failed. ”

“ In some species or varieties—e.g. Poa alpina, Festuca ovina—this viviparous condition may coexist with normal flowers and spikelets; in others—e.g. Poa laxa, var. stricta—only the viviparous state occurs.
In the following arrangement the student should note that the terms “Seed" and “Fruit" are used in the ordinary sense of the farmer and seedsman: by the former is meant the “seed" as it comes in samples into the market, when the true fruit or grain (Caryopsis) is almost invariably invested by adherent “chaff"—i.e. paleæ or glumes or both. ”

“ Many of the instances of so-called viviparous plants, e.g., Polygonum viviparum, may be cited under this head. [112] Many species of Allium, Lilium, Saxifraga, Begonia, Achimenes, normally produce leaf-buds or bulbs in the inflorescence; so, too, leafy shoots are sometimes [Pg 107] found in Alisma natans, Juncus uliginosus, Chlorophytum Sternbergianum, &c. As an accidental occurrence, a similar thing has been noticed in Lychnis coronaria, Phaius grandifolius, Oncidium cebolleta, Epidendrum elongatum, [113] &c. ”