Blossom and Seed 163 



It does not shoot up, and it makes no attempt to blossom; 

 and as the farmer does not want turnip-blossom, and does 

 want roots, he takes the latter while they are plump, and 

 well filled with the food intended for the seed. If he 

 waited till the next year he would see his turnip-plants 

 shoot up rapidly and blossom; and very thriving they 

 would look, no doubt; but all this time they would be 

 sucking away at the roots, which would be losing their 

 plumpness, and growing gradually hollower and more hol- 

 low, until, by the end of the second year, they would be 

 reduced to nothing but fiber, and be quite useless. 



We have spoken already of bulbous plants, such as 

 crocuses, whose blossoms are nourished on the food pre- 

 viously stored for them in the bulb, by the leaves, which, 

 in most cases, do the chief part of their work after the 

 blossoms have faded. But in some instances, as in that 

 of the colchicum, or meadow saffron, they come up and 

 make their preparations in the spring, for the blossoms 

 which do not appear till the autumn, long after the leaves 

 have vanished. In these cases the food for the blossoms 

 is stored in the bulbs; and if a tidy gardener unwarily cuts 

 off the leaves before the bulb is properly stocked, he 

 starves the blossoms. 



But some plants take years to prepare food sufficient 

 for the supreme effort of their lives. 



The American aloe, for instance, which was sup- 

 posed to blossom only once in a hundred years, though it 

 does not wait quite so long as this, does actually wait five 

 or six years in its own country, and from fifty to seventy 

 in ours, before it attempts to send up a flower-spike. But 

 when it does begin, it grows with such tremendous 

 energy — at the rate of a foot a day even in our conser- 



