The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming Part 23

"First, we will go over the life history of a plant, and then I'll tell you of this magic and how to work it. Or better yet my a.s.sistants 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. Just look at my geranium slips there! they seem to be breaking their backs to peep out of the window and look at their best friend, the sun. Turn all of them around, George. See, they face us now!

remember to look at them next Friday.

"But to start over again. A plant has just three necessary and important parts: these parts are the roots, stem, and leaves. No, Elizabeth, the fruit and flowers are not separate parts. Why? Well, merely because by some queer provision of the plant world, the leaves are responsible for making or forming both the flower and the fruit. If you watch a bud form and unfold, you will notice that the entire little bud seems to be a series of leaves. And if your fingers were clever enough you could take tiny leaves and fold them into the parts which go to make up the flower and the fruit. This last, like most of the rest of that I am telling you, is just one of the miracles of nature.

"The root, rootlets and root hairs all go to make up the root-system of a plant. This system is a feeding and food storage system; cold storage, we might call it.

"I have spoken before about how the root hairs absorb food. Food is soaked up something as a blotter soaks up ink. Underground plant food must be liquid in nature. This is because plants, like babies, must have very dilute food. Plants can no more get food out of a dry lump of soil than a little baby can get its food from a hunk of bread or a thick slice of corn beef. But let that soil be water-soaked, and have the proper bacteria at work, and the material is in plant-food form.

Josephine has here an old, old experiment. What was a white pink is now a red one. It has been in that gla.s.s of red ink and a little water. And lo, up the stem the red fluid climbed until it suffused the white flower and made it red. Notice as Miriam holds that lump of sugar only just touching the surface of the water, the water moves up that lump. In this way water and liquid food rise up the stems of plants. Just so, too, water rises in the soil from the lower layers up to the feeding place of the roots, and even up to the surface of the ground.

"As the roots are feeding and storing places, so the stem is a sort of pa.s.sage way for the pa.s.sing back and forth of liquids. Take a stem of a big plant, like an oak tree, and you see in the wood where storage of fibre has gone on. But the great work is that of interchange.

"Leaves are very active portions of the plant. They represent a great, busy manufactory. Manufacturing what? That question I see stamped on Myron's face so plainly he need not speak it out. Manufacturing real food out of raw material--that is the work of these plant shops.

"Let me tell you about this. Ethel has in her hands two little plants.

The one in her right hand has been growing in the light; the other, in her left hand, has been put away in the dark to grow. The absence of green colour is very marked in this latter plant. So you see it takes light to form this green, or chlorophyll as it is called. The chlorophyll-saturated cells, absorbing carbonic acid and the water-diluted food from the soil, literally break them up. And when broken, food is found suitable for plants to absorb. Wonderful, is it not?

"I spoke of carbonic acid; well, this is a gas, as some of you have found out before, made up of carbon and oxygen. It is a gas which we of the animal kingdom breathe out as waste from our bodies. The plant takes it in through the leaf--and, by the way, I ought to explain that. It is this way: if we had a magnifying gla.s.s we should find over the inner surface of leaves, pores, or stomata as they are called. They open in the presence of light; and from these openings what the plant has no use for pa.s.ses out, and gases from the air may pa.s.s in. Some call these openings breathing pores.

"Quant.i.ties of water pa.s.s out through these pores. When this process goes on too rapidly a plant will wilt.

"So, to go back, we will suppose that carbonic acid gas has pa.s.sed into the leaves. Straightway the chlorophyll bodies get to work. The gas is broken up, and oxygen and carbon are left. The carbon is wood the plant builds. Some of the oxygen pa.s.ses out into the air and some is kept for plant food use.

"It is a good thing for us that some of the oxygen does escape into the air for we need it. So you see we, in our respiration, and the plant, in its breathing, are doing each other a good turn.

"Of course, there is the dilute food from the soil, which is largely mineral matter and water. The chlorophyll bodies work away on these minerals, and make them into foods. A great body of water, as I have said before, pa.s.ses out of the plant through the stomata.

"I have told you a thing that the plant can do which we are not capable of doing. A plant takes a mineral and makes it over into food. You and I, unless we happen to be circus gla.s.s-eaters, are not built to do this work. But the vegetables which we eat do the work for us.

"A great deal of plant food is in the form of sugars and starches. I remember Katharine and Peter told me last winter that in their physiology they learned how sugars and starches were made in our own bodies. And lo and behold, the geranium can do a similar thing.

"Some plants store up lots of starch, as the potato. Others store quant.i.ties of sugar, as the Southern sugar cane and the beet. Wonderful?

Well, I guess it is. If we could hear and see all the work these energetic little chlorophyll bodies are doing, we should be amazed.

"You will remember that I told you some plants could take the very necessary chemical nitrogen from the air; most of them, however, must get it from the soil. And so again this from the soil solution is worked over into available food.

"After all we must not fail to see that water is most important. It floats all the important food elements to the leaves for the work to be done there. The food carbon, of course, is an exception to this rule and I will say again in certain cases nitrogen is, also.

"Thus you boys and girls now understand how necessary it is that a soil should be of the right texture to hold water. If it is not, it must be helped to be so. Sand, you will remember, had to be doctored to hold water. Clay needed treatment in order to make it quit its bad habit of baking out.

"Here is a rather interesting experiment set up by Josephine and Ethel.

Look at the first piece of apparatus--a tumbler partly full of water, a piece of cardboard over the top of the tumbler, and pa.s.sing down through a hole in the cardboard a piece of plant just stem stripped of leaves, and finally a second tumbler clapped over the first. The second piece of apparatus is exactly like the first, only that the stem, one end of which is in the water, has leaves on the other end. Notice that the upper gla.s.s in the second case has moisture on it. The upper tumbler of the other set is perfectly dry. Whence, then, came the moisture? It must, of course, be the leaves which gave it off, since they represent the only difference in the two pieces of apparatus.

"I wish we might go on with whole sets of experiments, but for that we have not time.

"You understand a little of the mission of root, stem and leaf. The root does a good work in holding a plant in place. It is the foundation material of the plant. There is much, much more to be learned about all these subjects. This little is just to open your eyes to the wonders of the work each plant is performing all the time.

"I said I would show you some magic. Well, this magic has to do with plant improvement. It is not much of a trick to raise a plant, but it is a great one to be able to improve that plant.

"Let me tell you of a friend of mine whom we will call Rodney, because that is his real name. One day Rodney noticed the gardener doing something with a little flat knife to a pansy. Then he tied a little paper bag over the pansy, of course leaving the whole thing on the plant.

"'What are you doing?' asked the lad. 'I am fixing that pansy so that the seed from it shall be finer seed than they otherwise would be.'

"Then the old gardener explained this to Rodney: There are two parts to flowers which are very necessary, absolutely necessary to making seed.

One part is the pistil, the other the stamen. Some flowers have both pistils and stamen, while others have just the pistil and one has to hunt for another plant having the stamen. You can tell the stamens in this way: they are the parts which have in their care the pollen. Most of you know pollen as a yellow powder or dust. Sometimes it is a sticky gummy ma.s.s. The pistil is that part of the flower which ends in the seed vessel. It very often takes a central position in the flower, standing up importantly as if it were the 'part' of the flower. And after all, it is. Now, when this pollen powder falls on the pistil it does not explode. The pistil merely opens up a bit and down travels the powder into the seed vessel to help form seed. There would be no real fertile seed without the pollen.

"Sometimes the pollen from one flower falls on its own pistil, sometimes the wind, the bees, the birds carry the pollen to flowers far off and drop it on their pistils. Marvelous, is it not? Everything has to be just right, or the pollen does not do its work nor the pistil, either.

Pollen has to be ripe to help make the seed.

"But how can the work of the wind and the bees and the birds be improved on? Just as the old gardener was doing it. He had one pansy, oh such a large one, but not at all beautiful in colour. He had another one, small but exquisite in colouring. If he could but grow those two together, shake them up, say a magic word and get a pansy both beautiful and large!

"Rodney's gardener used magic but not a magic wand. He took a little knife called a scalpel. He carefully took some pollen from the beautiful pansy and then rubbed it gently over the pistil of the big pansy. The pollen was all ready to drop, and by this he knew it was ripe.

"Why did he place a bag over the pansy? Well, simply because he didn't wish that pansy interfered with. Suppose the bag were not on; suppose after he had put the pollen on, the wind had blown other pollen to this same pistil? Let us suppose that this other pollen came from a very inferior flower. The experiment would have been spoiled.

"Any of you can try this plant improvement. I see by Katharine's eyes and Dee's also that they are going to try it. It is well if you have a pair of forceps. Then you need not use your fingers against the plant at all. Gently pull the pistil a bit forward, gently place the pollen on with the scalpel and you have performed the operation entirely with the proper instruments.

"The girls did some saving of fine specimens of flowers this fall, but the kind of work of which I have just told you means far more. In the one case you choose from what you have; in the other case you make what you want.

"Good-by, again, until next Friday afternoon!"

V

INCREASING PLANTS

"This last garden season we have tried two methods of raising plants: one was by seed; the other by slips or cuttings. The girls will typify still another method with their bulbs. This last method is by division.

A bulb as it stores up its nourishment after the blossoming time forms new little bulbs. These may be separated from the parent tuber if large enough. You all saw me dividing my peonies. Those peonies doubtless were started years ago from one or two roots. And now when I dug them up it looked as if I were laying in a stock of sweet potatoes so great was the increase.

"There are just three other methods of propagating or increasing plants.

These are layering, budding and grafting.

"Layering is done in several ways. Suppose you have a gooseberry bush you wish to layer. The time to do the work is after the flowering season is past. Choose a branch which has not flowered. Strip off the lower leaves. Now where the old and new wood meet is the place for the cut.

Make a cut right into the stem which will be like a tongue. Let this be about an inch long. Hold this to the ground with the cut side down. Bank soil over this. At and under the tongue the new shoots will start, and the new gooseberry bush grow from this. This new plant may be cut off from the parent. If the twig will not stay bent down in this position, cut a forked piece of wood which shall act as a pin. Do you picture this? A branch bent so that not far from the parent plant it is buried under ground with the rest of the root protruding from the ground.

"A rubber plant may be layered or topped as it is called. Rubber plants have an ugly habit of going to top, dropping off their lower leaves as they do this. So they look as if they were trying to develop into huge bushes, and they become very ugly in so doing. The top looks all right and many a person wishes that top were off all by itself and nicely potted.

"This is the way it is topped. A slit is cut in the bark about where you would like to see roots growing. Then soil and florists' moss is bound about the wound. These may easily be kept moist. A paper pot could be put about the soil if one wished. The soil ma.s.s should be a ball of about six inches in diameter. When the new roots appear through the moss or poking out of the paper pot, cut the stem of the plant below the pot. And behold you have a little rubber plant just as good as new, I have told this before to the girls.

"Another method of layering is to cut the parent off down to the ground.

What is left is called the stool. This stool should be covered with about six inches of earth. Let us suppose this is done in early spring.

When fall comes around uncover the stool. There will be found a number of new shoots or plants all nicely protected. These may be transplanted.

Do you know that stool can be used over again?