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AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



June, 1907 



The Nuptials of the Flowers 



By Percy Collins 



I HAT plants marry and are given in mar- 

 riage is a fact well known to all students of 

 botany. As the late Grant Allen quaintly 

 put it: "Flowers are the husbands and 

 wives of plants. And in some cases the 

 sexes are as fully separated as in birds and 

 beasts; when once you know them, you can 

 distinguish at sight a male or a female flower as readily as 

 you can distinguish a bull from a cow, or a peacock from a 

 peahen." But as the subject of plant-marriage may be quite 

 a novel one to many readers, a few words of introduction may 

 not be out of place. 



Most people know that a typical flower has at least three 

 parts, or three sets of parts. These are the brightly colored 

 petals, the stamens covered with yellow pollen-dust, and the 

 pistil (or pistils) which usually occupies a central position. 

 For the moment we may disregard the colored petals : they 

 have no direct bearing upon the question of plant sex. It is 

 the stamens and the pistil which represent the male and the 

 female portions of the flower. In order that the seed of the 

 plant may be rendered fertile, it is necessary for some of 

 the golden pollen of the stamens to come in contact with 

 the pistil. 



In the case of certain flowers, however, we find only two, 

 instead of three sets of parts. The beautiful begonias, for 

 example, are flowers of this kind. Certain of the blossoms 

 are wholly male, while others are wholly female, and there 

 is no combining of the sexes in one bloom after the more 

 common plan. If the reader will examine a begonia plant 



I — Female and Male Flowers of the Begonia 



2 — " Peacock " Butterflies and Scabious Blooms 



Moreover, Nature evinces a decided objection to what is 

 called "self-fertilization." Often, in cases where both pistil 

 and stamens are found in the same flower, she has so dis- 

 posed these organs as to render the pollination of the former 

 by the latter impossible. By some means or other pollen 

 must be brought to the pistil from another bloom, or the 

 seeds will not set. It is clear, then, that if cross-fertilization 

 is to be secured at all, it must be brought about by some 

 agent or agents quite distinct from the plants themselves. 



Such an agent is the wind, which wafts the pollen in a 

 dust-like cloud across the country-side, applying a little to the 

 purpose for which it was produced, and wasting far more 

 than is used. Many kinds of trees and grasses are thus wind- 

 fertilized, and they possess, almost without exception, incon- 

 spicuous flowers — i. e. flowers quite perfect as to their es- 

 sential organs but devoid of brightly colored petals. Flow- 

 ers possessed of conspicuous petals are generally, if not in- 

 deed invariably, cross-fertilized by agents other than the 

 wind. In fact, as the reader will shortly perceive, the bright 

 petals have an intimate connection with the problem of 

 cross-fertilization. With the nuptials of these conspicuous 

 flowers — the only flowers, indeed, which fall within the pop- 

 ular application of the word — the present article deals. 



It may be said at once that the chief cross-fertilizing 

 agents of the flowers are insects. No group of living crea- 



(Fig. i) he will readily distinguish between the two kinds of 

 flowers. The male flower has (usually) only four petals sur- 

 rounding a number of pollen-coated stamens; the female 

 flower has five petals, a center of curiously twisted stigmas 

 representing the pistil, and (behind) an enlarged ovary in 

 which the seeds will be developed. 



Now in the case of plants such as this, with the sexes sup- 

 ported on separate stalks at safe distance one from the other, 

 the question arises: How is the pistil of the female flower 

 pollinated? The gardener gets over the difiiculty by using 

 a camel's hair brush, by which he carries the pollen from the 

 stamens of one flower to the pistil of another. But in a 

 state of nature, and In the desolate regions where many of 

 our most beautiful hothouse flowers grow wild no kindly 

 gardener goes from plant to plant with his brush. 



3 — Umbelliferous Blooms Crowded by Small Beetles 



