50 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
A striking example 
of the conversion of 
“availahle” food in¬ 
to plant tissue is 
furnished hy the 
seedling and ma¬ 
ture pepper, shown 
above and at the 
right 
In that infinitesimal universe you would see 
masses of rock and of soil being undermined and 
dissolved by rivers of water flowing around them 
and by columns of water descending—and ascend¬ 
ing—through invisible tubes; hilltops and crags 
rushing together across empty spaces and coales¬ 
cing into new forms and substances; solid walls 
melting down into turgid pools and, in turn, 
changing them; herds of grotesque animals, in in¬ 
finite numbers, swarming in the forests of dead 
and dying roots and the pastures of root hairs; 
still other creatures rushing the construction of 
vast laboratories on growing roots and storing 
nitrogen therein, gathered from the air more 
cheaply than man himself can get it, the “surplus 
product” of generations heaping up before your 
eyes even while you gazed. And every boulder 
and crag, every decaying root log, is encased in a 
sheath of water. 
Through all this chaotic dissolution, changes and 
re-formation, there would push perpetually, ex¬ 
panding before your eyes as if by magic and pene¬ 
trating each ever-changing valley and crevasse and 
cave and canyon, the trunk roots and branch roots 
of growing plants, gigantic in size when seen on 
the same scale as the things I have been describ¬ 
ing. From the tips of the smallest rootlets, some¬ 
thing like the tentacles of a subterranean octopus, 
the “root hairs” would twist and twine and cling 
to every available surface, drinking up through 
their porous side walls inconceivably great quanti¬ 
ties of the water everywhere present. 
This picture is, of course, magnified—but not 
exaggerated. When you stop to think that a single 
squash plant, springing from a seed no larger than 
an elongated nickel and dead and gone in a few 
short weeks, produces in that time some fifteen 
miles of roots, you get some idea of the rapidity 
with which the plant’s work must be done. When 
I say enormous quantities of water, that is not 
The faint dark line 
through the stem of 
the okra seedling is 
the“artery” through 
which nourishment 
is drawn up. The 
succulent pods of 
this plant should be 
better known 
This is. the first of a series of articles by Mr. Edson on the really elemental points in 
successful gardening—the facts and operations which, while they may be as A B C 
to the experienced, are an unopened book to the beginner. , IVith the present tremendous 
increase in the numbers of those who grow things for pleasure, every season sees a new 
company of novices who '‘want to know how.” For them this series has been written 
so as to give, progressively from its simplest beginnings, the whole story of the 
gardening game.—Editor 
W ITHOUT a 
doubt, g a r- 
dening is the 
sport—^or the recre¬ 
ation, or the gentle 
art, or whatever you 
want to call it—of 
more universal ap¬ 
peal than any other. Just wherein lies its attrac¬ 
tion may be hard to analyze, but the fact of its 
claim upon all classes, in all climes, remains. The 
hard-working artisan, the bronzed frontiersman, 
the lady of gentle birth, the black-shawled woman 
of the tenement—to all these the silent magnetism 
of the brown soil, with its latent possibilities of 
glorious blooms and haunting fragrances, and pal¬ 
ate-tickling, fresh, green things, is irresistible. 
It is my purpose, in tbis article and others to 
follow, to make plain, for those new recruits and 
late beginners which every season brings, the prob¬ 
lems they are sure to encounter. To make them 
plain, not in terms of garden phraseology, but in 
the language of the uninitiated, so that even he or 
she who has not yet learned to run may read and 
understand. I shall keep in mind the person who 
has literally done little or no gardening; and I 
shall also keep in mind the fact that for such per¬ 
sons there is available very little material concern¬ 
ing the elemental operations and principles of 
gardening, described in non-technical language. 
One of the first things with which the prospec¬ 
tive gardener should become familiar is how plants 
grow. And yet, in the ordinary course of events, 
this is about the last thing one learns. Until you 
can understand something of plant physiology and 
plant hygiene—how a plant “works” as an organ¬ 
ism, how it eats and breathes and rests and accom¬ 
plishes its purpose in life like any other living 
thing—the directions you may read must to some 
extent remain unintelligible to you. 
Some Plant Physiology 
Do not fear that I am either going to destroy the 
element of mystery that perhaps more than any¬ 
thing else makes gardening fascinating, or to cut 
oflf, with the inquisitive scissor-blades of modern 
science, the very flower which has charmed you, 
unmindful of the fact that your interest in it may 
wilt with the fragile petals. The real mystery, the 
elusive silver thread of re-perpetuated life, is as 
far as ever from being explained. You can read a 
book of rules on gardening, just as you can read 
a book of rules on running an automobile. But 
you will be a better driver when you know every 
part of your engine, and just what it is meant to 
do; and you will be a far more competent gar¬ 
dener when you understand how plants grow, 
what things will help or hinder them, and why. 
How do plants grow? 
Did you ever stop to wonder what force can 
make the sap run up to the top of an 8' lily or an 
80' oak? Or how the blind and almost microscopic¬ 
ally fragile roots of the rose, tunneling their way 
through the “dead clods” at her feet, can select 
the marvelously delicate pigments with which her 
frail flower-petals are painted? Ah, but those 
clods are not dead ! Could you view them with an 
eye that really sees, you would behold stupendous 
changes, cosmic upheavings taking place under 
your feet. Minute in scale though they are, they 
are none the less closely intertwined, each affect¬ 
ing the others in the general scheme. 
even magnified. The 
sunflowers growing 
in your garden draw 
from the soil and 
evaporate through 
their leaves into the 
air, during their 
short season of 
growth, enough water to cover the soil in which 
tliey grow more than 13" deep. It would take your 
whole family more than a lifetime to count the 
“mouths” through which this water is evaporated; 
on a single large leaf there are some 13,000,000 of 
them ! For each pound of dry matter a sunflower 
makes, some eight hundred pounds of water are 
sucked up from the soil by the insatiably thirsty 
roots of the plant. 
With this general picture in mind of conditions 
below the surface of the soil, we can proceed to 
consider a little more in detail the physical mech¬ 
anism of plant growth, and the facts influencing it. 
Soil and Plant Food 
The basis of all plant growth is, of course, the 
soil; and yet the soil, as we speak of it, is not 
essential to plant growth. Trees of large size have 
been grown even to the third and fourth genera¬ 
tion in pure water to which certain chemicals were 
added at the discretion of the experimenter. The 
first thing to get clear in your mind regarding the 
soil is that it is only the medium for holding the 
foods which the plants must have to live —water 
and certain other things which most soils contain, 
or which can be added to them. The thing we 
have to learn to do is so to handle the particular 
soil that the plant roots ramifying through it will 
find abundant stores of moisture and food. What 
treatment this may necessitate in any special case 
will depend upon the physical character of the cer¬ 
tain soil, its antecedents, and a number of other 
things which will be discussed later. 
The plant foods, as I have already intimated, 
must be of such a nature, or in such chemical com¬ 
binations, that they are soluble in tbe water pres¬ 
ent in tbe soil. This is not pure water, but contains 
certain elements absorbed from the soil which 
strengthen it and enable it to dissolve plant foods 
in the soil which are insoluble in pure water alone. 
Plant foods in forms which this soil water dis¬ 
solves and, therefore, makes them ready for the 
plant to utilize, are known as available plant foods; 
those which the water cannot dissolve are called 
unavailable. But unavailable forms may be made 
available through decomposition, the action of bac¬ 
teria in the soil, and through chemical changes 
which take place there. The gardener’s work, 
therefore, consists largely in finding and applying 
means of speeding up this gradual change of un¬ 
available plant foods into available forms. That 
is one of the biggest problems that confronts him, 
and yet his work in that direction is of such a 
nature that he cannot see what he is accomplishing, 
except as its results show in bigger and finer 
flowers and vegetables. 
The life history of the plant is in brief as fol¬ 
lows : The “life germ,” which has had a period of 
rest in the seed, bulb, tuber or other form in which 
it happens to be stored, is stimulated into action 
again by a congenial environment of temperature 
and moisture, and whatever more may be required 
in its particular case. Usually, there has been 
(Continued on page 701 
The seed sprouts in 
two directions: up¬ 
ward into the 
leaves, and down 
into the roots. This 
is an eggplant seed¬ 
ling. The plant and 
fruit are below 
