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Updated: June 29, 2025
A year ago I sowed seed by the ounce each of A. alpina and of A. sulphurea, but as yet not a single plantlet has rewarded me for my trouble. Even freshly gathered seeds of A. narcissiflora will not germinate with me, but I live in hopes of surmounting little difficulties of this kind, and in the mean time, perhaps, others more fortunate will tell us how to amend our unsuccessful ways.
When the soil is turned over carefully, enriched and prepared perfectly for the seed; when rain is abundant, sunshine plenteous and mother-earth's spring quickening is instinctive, is it to be wondered at that the rootlet delves, the plantlet lifts itself, the bud forms quickly, and unexpectedly spreads its petal-star to the sunlight which enhances its beauty and fructifies its work of reproduction?
Every time you plant your feet upon the snow you press down thousands of seeds, minute forms of life, each with its little store of starch or albumen, carefully compounded in Nature's laboratory, sufficient to sustain the embryonic life until the tiny plantlet learns to draw nourishment from the breast of Mother Earth and to breathe health and vigor from the sunshine and the air.
The seed coats need not be lettered, as they do not belong to the plantlet. After drawing the Morning-Glory series, let them draw the Sunflower or Squash in the same way, then the Bean, and finally the Pea. Let them write answers to the following questions: MORNING-GLORY. If the teacher prefer, he may begin with the Squash, Bean, and Pea. Tell the parts of the Morning-Glory seed.
In each one of these they find a tiny hole, and into this they creep, and then they pour into the ovule all the protoplasm from the pollen-grain which is sticking above, and this enables it to grow into a real seed, with a tiny plantlet inside. This is how the plant forms its seed to bring up new little ones next year, while the leaves and the roots are at work preparing the necessary food.
In the middle of the ball, in a cluster, there are a number of round transparent little bodies, looking something like round green orange-cells full of juice. They are really cells full of protoplasm, with one little dark spot in each of them, which by-and-by is to make our little plantlet that we found in the seed. "These, then, are seeds," you will say.
We had to pass on to the flower, and learn the use of the covering leaves, the gaily coloured crown attracting the insects, the dust-bags holding the pollen, the little ovules each with the germ of a new plantlet, lying hidden in the seed- vessel, waiting for the pollen-grains to grow down to them.
Here it finds starch, oils, sugar, and substances called albuminoids, the sticky matter which you notice in wheat-grains when you chew them is one of the albuminoids. This food is all ready for the plantlet to use, and it sucks it in, and works itself into a young plant with tiny roots at one end, and a growing shoot, with leaves, at the other. But how does it grow? What makes it become larger?
We saw the plantlet buried in it, and learnt how it fed at first on prepared food, but soon began to make living matter for itself out of gases taken from the water through the cells to its stomach the leaves! And how marvellously the sun-waves entering there formed the little green granules, and then helped them to make food and living protoplasm!
It is because there is so much food stored in the first two that the plumule can develop before a root is formed, while in the others there is only nourishment sufficient to enable the plantlet to form its roots. These must make the second leaves by their own labor. Comparison with other Dicotyledons. The pupils should now have other seeds to compare with these four.
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