CALIFORNIA PLANTS IN THEIR HOMES 



Iii your experiments you found that the cactus and the 

 Sedum lost less water than any of your other plants. It is 

 easy to see why. If you were to take two equal lumps of 

 clay, and roll one up into a ball and make the other into 

 thin leaves, you know which would dry out first. Indeed 

 the cactus know so well how to store water that it can live 

 through the summer in deserts where all other plants perish 

 entirely or die back to the ground. 



Other plants beside the cactus adopt the plan of 

 presenting little surface for evaporation during the dry 

 season. Your collection is sure to include plants with few 

 leaves or with small leaves. The wild broom, Fig. u, has 

 both small and scattered leaves, but the stems are green, 

 too, and help in the food-making, so that in unexposed 

 places this plant can go on flowering all the year round. 

 The plant in Fig. 12 is one kind of Eriogonum. There are 

 nearly two hundred kinds, and they abound in the drier 

 parts of Western America, often where few other plants can 

 exist. The Eriogonutns have usually small, woolly leaves. 

 Often the leaves grow close to the ground and die early in 

 the dry season ; after this the plant does not grow much, 

 but it can develop flowers and fruit by means of food 

 already stored, helped out by what the green cells in the 

 woolly stems manufacture. 



The plant pictured in Fig. 13 belongs to the same 

 family as the tarweeds, sage brushes, everlasting flowers, sun 

 flowers and many others that you have probably collected. 

 This family is called Compositse ; and it is the very largest 

 and perhaps the most clever of all plant families. We shall 

 study the flowers in the spring, but you will be interested 

 then to remember how many of the family know how to 

 meet hard times. Their devices are many, as you have 

 seen, but the most common one, perhaps, is a hairy covering. 



A thick coating of hairs is probably the best protection 

 of all for plants that are really active during the summer. 



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