. Lessons with plants. Suggestions for seeing and interpreting some of the common forms of vegetation. our petal-likebracts and the calla spadix by a corolla-likespathe. 197. One cloudy morning the dandelions hadvanished. A search in the grass revealed num-bers of buds, but no blossoms. Then an houror two of sunshine brought them out, and welearned that flowers often behave differently atdifferent times of the day and in various kindsof weather. 198. In spite of the most persistent work withthe lawn mower, the dandelions went to seed pro-fusely. At first, we cut off many of the flower-heads, b
. Lessons with plants. Suggestions for seeing and interpreting some of the common forms of vegetation. our petal-likebracts and the calla spadix by a corolla-likespathe. 197. One cloudy morning the dandelions hadvanished. A search in the grass revealed num-bers of buds, but no blossoms. Then an houror two of sunshine brought them out, and welearned that flowers often behave differently atdifferent times of the day and in various kindsof weather. 198. In spite of the most persistent work withthe lawn mower, the dandelions went to seed pro-fusely. At first, we cut off many of the flower-heads, but as the season advanced they seemed toescape us. They bent their stems upon the groundand raised their heads as high as possible andyet not fall victims to the machine; and presentlythey shot up their long soft stems and scatteredtheir tiny balloons to the wind, and when thelawn-mower next passed, they were either ripe ortoo high to be caught by the machine. 199. This seed has behaved strangely in themeantime. The fringe of pappus (as the bristle-like calyx is called) is raised above the seed by. Fig. 172. Variation in dandelion leaves. All drawn natural size and thenreduced one-half. 176 LESSONS WITS PLANTS a short, narrow neck (e, Fig. 170), when the plantis in flower; but at seed-time this neck hasgrown an inch long (Fig. 171), the anthers, stylesand corolla have perished, the pappus has growninto a spreading parachute, and the ovary haselongated into a hard, seed-like body. Each oneof us has blown the tiny balloons from the whitereceptacle, and has watched them float away tosettle point downwards in the cool grass; but per-haps we had not always associated these balloonvoyages with the planting of the dandelion. 200. The dandelion, then, has many curioushabits. It belongs to the great class of composi-tous (or compound) flowers, which, with variousforms, comprises about one-tenth of all the flow-ering plants of the earth. The structure of theseplants is so peculiar that a
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