THE STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION OF HIGHER PLANTS 8 1 



cultivated form, becomes a bright, slightly rusty red. On Cape Cod and 

 in New Jersey the cranberry plants in the bogs turn a dull, reddish purple 

 after the fruits have been picked; at the same time glasswort splashes its 

 vivid red against the brown of the grasses in the salt marshes along our 

 coast. 



In dry, rather sandy soil the grasses, especially the beard grasses, may be 

 seen bowing in unison to let the breeze go by. These also become colored 

 in the fall, forming reddish brown carpets on the hillside. Very slowly 

 do they fade, so that the tints of autumn may still linger at Christmas time; 

 and these grasses often stick up hopefully through the first thin snows. 

 Only long after the winter silence has descended do they fade into a pale 

 yellowish brown. 



Not a httle is added by the fruits that ripen in the fall. Bittersweet 

 sprawls and twines and shows its orange capsules and scarlet seeds; hollies, 

 growing in swamps as well as in sands, mature their red berry-like fruits; 

 barberry bushes are often laden with red; while hawthorn, after the leaves 

 are gone, shows brilliant red against the blue of the autumn sky. 



These are some of the more important contributors to that symphony 

 of color that is played each year on the hillsides of North America. If 

 there is a "hard-frost" or a pronounced "dry-spell," the performance is 

 syncopated, leaving the dark green of the pines and hemlocks and spruces 

 enlivened only by the barks of such trees as the birch, the beech and 

 the red maple. 



The brilHant display of autumn is really the result of two sets of fac- 

 tors; one is the wonderful assortment of broadleaved trees in the East, 

 capable of developing these colors; the other is the weather — the clear, 

 bright days and cool, crisp nights that are so characteristic of the fall in 

 our eastern states. "Football weather" is conducive to brilliant foliage, as 

 well as to husky voices on Sunday morning. 



On what parts of the earth does this coloration occur? There are only 

 three large areas of temperate broad-leaved forests on this earth — one in 

 eastern North America, one in eastern Asia and one in Europe, including 

 central Europe and the British Isles. In the southern hemisphere such 

 forests are almost lacking, except for a small region in southern South 

 America, mostly in Chile, and very limited areas in Tasmania and New 

 Zealand. 



Eastern North America and eastern Asia are strikingly alike in their 

 plant populations. It may seem rather anomalous that floristically there is 

 a greater similarity between eastern North America and eastern Asia than 

 between our own East and our own West. No places on this earth have a 

 richer assortment of valuable broad-leaved trees than eastern North Amer- 

 ica and eastern Asia. Our West has matchless forests of conifers, like the 

 pines, Douglas fir, redwood, and hosts of others. In fact, many of the 

 lands that are washed by the waters of the Pacific are rich in conifers. 



