The Study of Plant Life, M. C. Stopes [fiction book recommendations .txt] 📗
- Author: M. C. Stopes
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Leaves, as you know, require much water, which comes to them up the stem through the “water-pipes.” You saw already the course of the water-pipes in leaves, for they are the “veins” which we found sometimes make a complete network, and sometimes run parallel in the tissue of the leaf. If you put a leaf stalk in red ink, you will see that the veins are connected with the water-pipe strands in the stalk, for they will both get coloured by the ink as it passes along them.
Just as in animals the whole body is covered over with a skin, so in plants we find a special outside sheet of cells, which protect the inner tissues and form a thin skin. You can get this off very well if you break across an iris leaf, and pull along the thin, colourless layer on the outside. If you examine it with your lens, you may perhaps see something of the mosaic-like pattern of the cells which build it up. You should certainly see that it is colourless, although the tissue of the leaf beneath it is quite green.
On the large branches of trees and the bigger plants, we do not find this delicate protecting layer, but instead there is a thick brown cork. When the cork layer gets very thick it splits irregularly as the tree grows too big for it, and so forms a rugged bark. The cork layers have much the same duty as the fine skin, only they are thicker and stronger, and more suited to hold out through the winter. You know already from daily life the practical use of cork, for you put it into bottles to keep the liquid in the bottle and the damp and dust in the air from entering. Just what the cork does for the bottle, the sheets of cork wrapping round the branches do for the plant. They prevent it from being dried up by cold winds, and they keep out the heavy rains of winter which would injure it. Roots have a cork coating also when they get old. As you may remember, it is only the tip of the root which can absorb water for the plant, so that in the young part of the root a cork layer would be very much out of place, and you will never find it there. You will find instead the little delicate root-hairs, which absorb water and pass it on to the older parts; these old parts do no more absorbing, they are only the water carriers and food storers, and so have no hairs and are protected by a layer of cork.
As we found before, plants breathe in air like animals, and you may ask how they can do this when they are covered with their thick air-tight layers of cork. Examine a fairly old elder twig, and you will see all over its brown skin numbers of darker brown spots. If you look at these with your magnifying glass, you will see that they are quite spongy and soft. They are the special entrances for air, and are the breathing spots or lenticels (see fig. 96). They are to be found in all corky stems, although they are not always so easy to see as in the elder.
Fig. 96. Piece of Elder twig, showing the breathing pores in the bark.
On the leaves and stems of many plants you will find a large number of hairs. In some cases there are so many as to make the whole plant quite woolly, like the mouse-ear leaves. These hairs are protective, and keep the leaf warm and dry, and in some cases may shelter it from the sun. Hairs may consist of one cell, or several in a row, or of cells which are branched in a complicated way. Certain hair-cells protect the plant by stinging, as you can see if you watch a nettle-leaf with your magnifying-glass, and then rub your finger along it, only touching the hairs. You will find that it is they which sting you, and not the leaf itself.
Now we have found several kinds of tissues in plants, the skin and cork covering all over and protecting the rest; the central vessels or water-pipes, corresponding to the veins and arteries of animals, the soft white ground tissue, which in some stems may be very loosely packed, and the soft green tissue in the leaves and young stems, which we found was the food-manufacturing part of the plant. There are also strands of simple strengthening tissue, both by the water-pipes and in separate bundles in the soft tissue; these we may take as representing the bones of animals.
We have noticed (Chapter VIII.) that plants are sensitive to light and bend towards it, that they feel heat and cold, and that the stem and root seem to know when they are growing in the right or wrong positions, and bend accordingly. We know that we ourselves and the animals recognize such things by the help of nerves which carry messages to the brain. But where is the brain in plants, and the nerves? No true nerves have been found in plants, and it seems as though different parts of the plant were specially sensitive without there being any “brains.” So that we cannot speak of a central nervous system in even the highest plants as we can in the animals. In this respect they are built on quite a different plan from animals.
SPECIALISATION IN PLANTS CHAPTER XVIII.
FOR PROTECTION AGAINST LOSS OF WATER
If you go along the lanes and in the gardens in the height of summer when it is hot and dry and the sun beats on the plants all day, you may see them beginning to wither for want of water. The roots are not able to find enough moisture in the soil to supply the leaves, which, being in the hot air, continue to transpire away the water resources of the plant, so that in the end each of its cells must suffer and the whole become limp and droop. This happens because the ordinary green plants of our country make no special preparation for such dry weather. Our hot season is short, and even in the summer we have frequent showers which keep the soil moist enough to provide the plants with water from day to day, so that they have not become accustomed to long periods when there is no prospect of rain.
Fig. 97. A Cactus with needle-like spines for leaves, and a thick green stem.
Compare one of our usual green plants, a sunflower, for example, with such a thing as a cactus, which you may get growing in a pot of dry sand. The cactus is able to withstand the hottest sun for days, though it gets very little water, and sometimes apparently none at all; yet it does not wither, but grows, and may bear the most lovely flowers. From travellers we learn how the huge cactus plants grow in dry and stony deserts, standing every day in the blazing sun. Such is, of course, their home, and they are used to it; but how is it that they are able to flourish under conditions which would kill one of our own green plants?
Let us look at their structure and see in what they differ from a usual plant. First, they have no green leaves, for these have developed into spines (see p. 62), while the sunflower has many large ordinary leaves.
You will remember that the surface of leaves is continually giving off water from its many pores. When a plant has a number of big leaves this transpiring area is large, while when it has no leaves at all, but a thick, green stem instead, then the amount of surface from which water vapour is being given off is very much reduced, even though there may be about an equal quantity of actual tissue in the two plants. You can see that this is the case if you take a ball or thick block of dough and roughly measure its surface, then roll it out till it is fairly thin and measure it again; you will see that the thinner you roll it the more surface there is; all the time, of course, the amount of actual dough remains the same. So that of two plants of the same bulk, the one with broad, thin leaves will expose the most surface to the air, and so lose more water than one with very thick leaves or none at all. The latter would therefore be better fitted to live under dry conditions.
But, you may say, leaves have a definite work to do; how can the plant live without them? In the cactus the thick stem is green and does the work of food building; naturally it cannot do so much for the plant as many big leaves could, but it does enough to allow it to live and grow slowly and surely for many years, though it cannot grow in each year nearly at the same rate as can the sunflower. If you cut through the stem of a cactus you will find that its skin is very thick and tough, and this thick coat protects the plant against the fierceness of the sun far more completely than the thin skin of a sunflower does. At the same time, the tissues of the two stems are different; the sunflower is hollow and delicate, but the cactus is very thick and juicy, and each cell contains much gummy stuff which has the power of holding water strongly. So that we see in many important points the structure of a cactus is different from that of a usual green plant, and is specially suited to the dry conditions of the desert.
Many desert plants are built on the plan of the cactus, but there are also others which are not at all like them, and yet they are able to live in deserts and very dry places. It you examine them, however, you will find that they all have some special way of protecting themselves from being dried up. Some of them have hard, dry, woody stems, well protected by corky layers, and they only put out green leaves in the rainy season, and lose them directly the hottest weather begins. Others, which grow from seed every year, learn to sprout, flower, and fruit very quickly while there is some moisture, and they form well-protected seeds, which wait till next rainy season. One very curious desert plant has only two leaves, which last it the whole of its life, and which are very hard and leathery. There are endless varieties of things which the plants may do to protect themselves from being dried up, and we can only look at a few special examples.
To find plants growing in desert places we do not need to go out of England, because from the point of view of the plant, one which is growing on a dry rock or on a patch of bare dry sand, is really growing in a little desert. For it the supply of water is the chief problem, even though we never get hot tropical sunshine in England. Look, for example, at the plants growing on the sand dunes which are very like deserts in appearance, and the plants on dry walls, or on the “screes” of broken rock at a hill foot; they are all growing in deserts.
In many cases plants growing in such positions have small thick leaves, nearly round,
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