VEGETATION

The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood. And they were cast upon the earth: And the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

—Rev. 8:7

7053 One-Fourth Of Earth

About 1/4 of the land surface of the earth—14 million square miles—is covered by woodlands. They range from tropical rain forests to sparse strands of stunted conifers at tree level.

7054 Beauty In Miniature

One of the world’s smallest plants, Cyclococcolithus leptoporus, has an elaborate outer shell of patterned scales. These plants are so tiny that 500 would fit on a pinhead.

But despite their size, some groups of plankton, such as a type known as Coccolithophoridae, are exotically beautiful. Each of these tiny plants has an outer armour of elaborately patterned scales made of chalk. They are the smallest-known plants in the world—at the other end of nature’s scale from the trees of California.

7055 Largest Seed

The largest pumpkin ever grown in California weighs 335 pounds.

But the world’s largest seeds resemble giant coconuts, and for centuries were thought to come from the sea. They were washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean and, consequently, those who found them called them sea coconuts.

But with the discovery of the Seychelles Islands in the mid-18th century, the seeds, which weigh upwards of 40 lb., and are two or three times the size of coconuts, were found to come from tall nut palms which grow only on the islands.

For years, Eastern kings and Oriental potentates eagerly sought the seeds, thinking that they could be used as antidotes to poison.

7056 England’s Tropical Seeds

Professor Thomas Henry Huxley, the famous English biologist, said that deeply buried in the English soil are tropical seeds of almost limitless variety, brought there by migrant birds from distant regions. The seeds lie dormant, waiting for a tropical climate to bring forth their lovely blossoms.

7057 Powerful Force Of Seeds

Turnip seeds, under good conditions, increase their weight 15 times a minute, and in rich soil turnip seeds may increase their weight 15,000 times a day.

There is no force more powerful than a growing squash. A squash 18 days old has been harnessed in such a way that in its growing process it lifted 50 pounds on lever—19 days later it lifted 5,000 pounds.

—The Uplift

7058 The Watermelon Seed

“I am not so much of a farmer as some people claim,” said Hon. W. J. Bryan in his lecture on “The Price of Peace,” “but I have observed the watermelon seed. It has the power of drawing from the ground and through itself 200,000 times its weight, and when you can tell me how it takes this material and out of it colors an outside surface beyond the imitation of art, and then forms inside of it a white rind and within again a red heart, thickly inlaid with black seeds, each one of which in turn is capable of drawing through itself 200,000 times its weight—when you can explain to me the mystery of a watermelon, you can ask me to explain the mystery of God.”

7059 Seeds In Mustard Plant

A gardener, prompted by curiosity, counted the seed pods on a medium-sized mustard plant. There were 85. The average number of seeds in each pod was eight. Since two crops in a given year could be matured, the gardener figured that it was possible in the interim between February and mid-October to produce a yield of 462,000 seeds, all from one original plant. Many other species of plants far exceed that increase.

7060 Example Of God’s Prodigality

An example of God’s prodigality is found in the golden polypody fern, which is common in greenhouses as well as outdoors in such places as Florida. Each frond (a fern develops seven new fronds yearly) bears twenty-five leaflets. Each leaflet bears approximately one hundred sori (a sorus is a spore case). Each sorus contains an estimated 57,000 reproductive spores. This multiplies to a little less than one billion spores, each of which is a potential plant.

This is but one instance of the Creator’s bounteous mode of operation. He purposes a super-adequacy. He demonstrated it with quails and manna, fish and loaves.

—Virginia Whitman

7061 Turnip Seeds

The seed of the globe turnip is about one-twentieth of an inch in diameter, and yet, in a few months, this seed will be enlarged by the soil and the air to 27,000,000 times its original bulk, and this in addition to a bunch of leaves. It has been found by experiment that it will, under fair conditions, increase its own weight 15 times in one minute. Turnips growing in peat ground will increase more than 15,000 times the weight of their seeds in one day.

—J. H. Bomberger

7062 Squash Power

A student of nature once tested the growing of a squash. When it was 18 days and measured 27 inches in circumference, he fixed a sort of harness around it, with a long lever attached. The power of the squash was measured by the weight it lifted. Two days after the harness was put on it lifted 60 pounds. On the nineteenth day it lifted 5000 pounds.

7063 An Electric Plant

There has been discovered in the forests of India a strange plant which possesses to a very high degree astonishing magnetic power. The hand which breaks a leaf from it immediately receives a shock equal to that produced by the conductor of an induction coil.

At a distance of nineteen feet a magnetic-needle is affected by it, and it will be quite deranged if brought near. The energy of this singular influence varies with the hour of the day. It is all-powerful about two o’clock in the afternoon, but is ineffective during the night. At times of storm, its intensity increases.

7064 To Reach The Light

M. Grinard mentions a plant which germinated in the bottom of a mine and raised itself to the height of one hundred and twenty feet in order to reach the light, though the usual height of the plant is only six inches.

7065 The Giant Saguaro

One of the remarkable growths of the Southwest desert is the giant saguaro, a tree-like cactus that attains heights of over fifty feet, and weights in excess of ten tons. Some specimens have fifty or more “arms” or branches.

Their efficient root system, which may be sixty or seventy feet in diameter, collects every bit of moisture that filters through the topsoil. This water is channeled to the tissues of the trunk and branches that have an accordion-like construction, enabling them to expand when water-soaked. In dry weather they contract so that the evaporative surface is reduced. This unusual water storage system functions so well that even after years of drought the saguaro still retains sufficient moisture to produce fruit.

7066 Pitcher-Plant Prisons

In the National Geographic magazines, Paul A. Zahl, Th.D., writes about the giant insect-trapping pitcher plants of Borneo called Nepenthes. These plants, which grow to an enormous size as big as washtubs—are literally death cells for unwary insects. The walls of the plant secrete a wax that makes it impossible for an insect to hold on. The insect tumbles into the well of the plant, where a fluid first drugs the insect and then slowly kills it. These perilous plants are beautiful to look at, but are deadly to the unsuspecting insect.

7067 The Strangler Fig

In the jungle grows a strange plant called the strangler fig. Although it is related to the fig tree whose fruit we eat, its habits are quite different.

The strange plant grows quickly, sending its shoots up and its roots down. Some of the roots wind themselves around the tree trunk. When they reach the soil, they “steal” nourishment which the tree needs.

Bigger and bigger grows the strangler, until the hapless tree is completely encased in its thick arms. The large leaves produced by the strangler keep necessary light from the victim tree. The tree, truly strangled by the strange plant, can grow no more. Gradually, it withers and dies.

Sometimes this killer plant grows to be sixty feet tall! Pity the tree which becomes host to this dangerous guest!

—Matilda Nordtyedt

7068 The “Life” Plant

There is a plant in Jamaica called the “life plant.” It is almost impossible to kill or destroy any part of it. If you detach a leaf from the plant and suspend it by a string to a wire, it does not wilt and die. It sends out threadlike rootlets which imbibe sustenance from the moisture of the air. New leaves begin to grow.

7069 Witchweed

A strange enemy invaded the fields of North and South Carolina a decade ago. Known in South Africa as the little red flower, this unwelcome visitor is a delicate, bright, green plant that grows to be nine or ten inches high. It is a pretty plant, with gay red and orange flowers shaped something like violets. It has never before been found in the Western Hemisphere.

Known as witchweed in the United States, witchweed’s way of life is one of the strangest in nature. The plants produce vast numbers of barely visible seeds, sometimes as many as half a million from a single plant. The seeds fall to the ground and mix with the soil where they can lie for twenty years without losing vitality.

A seed does not normally germinate until the rootlet of a suitable plant creeps close to it through the soil. Influenced by a mysterious substance that the root secrets, the seed wakes up. Out of it pokes a root that snakes through the soil, attaches itself to the host, and thrusts sucking tubes into its juicy tissues. Then life begins for the parasite; it quickly generates a network of roots and underground stems. Sometimes hundreds of witchweeds compete to strangle a single host plant.

7070 Scotland’s Emblem: Thistle

A great army, many years ago, invaded Scotland. They crept on stealthily over the border, and prepared to make a night attack on the Scottish forces. There lay the camp, all silently in the starlight, never dreaming that danger was so near. The Danes, to make their advance more noiseless, came forward barefooted.

But as they neared the sleeping Scots one unlucky Dane brought his broad foot down squarely on a bristling thistle. A roar or pain was the consequence, which rang like a trumpet blast through the sleeping camp. In a moment each soldier had grasped his weapon, and the Danes were thoroughly routed.

The thistle was from that time adopted as the national emblem of Scotland. God has His uses for even the simplest and humblest of us.

—Walter Baxendale.

7071 Beauty Winner: Weeds

A clump of weeds took the grand championship award in the Blue Earth County Fair flower show in Mankato, Minnesota. Shortly before the fair opened, Mrs. Richard Shuck, Jr., picked the weeds out of a roadside ditch, and in twenty minutes she had fashioned a lovely floral arrangement. Giant Foxtail, waterweed, and turkeyfoot were the tentative identifications given the winning weeds.

—Muriel Larson

7072 Imported Weeds

A government publication on weeds lists 205 species of weeds, but the plant kinds which most farmers and gardeners recognize as serious pests would number less than two dozen and, significantly, nearly all of those so-called “noxious” weeds were brought from other lands.

The Russian thistle’s introduction appears to be an example. The first seed is believed to have been present in flax brought from Russia to South Dakota in 1873. For a few years the menace went unrecognized, but the new plants with unusual low moisture requirements found it easy to adapt to the Great Plains environment and spread rapidly to every part of the United States and Canada where rainfall was light.

7073 A Revived Island

Nature has surprising powers of recovery from disaster. One of the most striking examples of this is offered by the Island of Krakatao in the Straits of Sunda. In 1883, an apparently inactive volcano erupted, splitting mountains from top to bottom, and scattering ground and greenery over a wide area. Nothing was left of the island but lifeless mass, a pile, one hundred feet deep, of burned-out ashes. Scientists of that day declared positively that no animal or vegetable life could possibly have survived this most gigantic eruption of history.

Nevertheless, in the next three years flowers and ferns began to peep out of the soil. Their seeds had been carried there by birds, and by the wind and sea. By 1897, many portions of the ground were covered with vegetation. Ten years more and the island was completely covered with trees and palms. After forty years the island was not only covered with plant growth, but also had its natural share of birds, animals, and insects.

—Selected

7074 Water In Cactus

In Arizona there are many varieties of the cactus. But probably the most valuable to man is the barrel cactus. This is a stubby, dome-shaped plant, growing from a foot to three or four feet in height. It always leans a bit toward the south. Inside this cactus is a juicy pulp which many times has saved the life of a traveler crossing the desert. The pulp when pressed out yields from a quart to a gallon of slightly bitter water.

On one occasion it is said that a man was crossing the desert between two mountain ranges. It was a very hot summer day, with the temperature around 120–130 degrees. There was no shade and the man was desperately thirsty. His life was saved when he discovered one of these barrel cacti, for he knew its value.

—Charles S. Scott

7075 Perfect Packaging

Dr. Ernest Dichter, the famous market researcher, wanted to find out what kind of packaging appealed to young people. A member of his staff gave some spending money to ten boys and turned them loose in a supermarket with instructions to come out with whatever looked best to them.

Each one of them came out with a big watermelon.

—Saturday Review

7076 The Water Hyacinth

An exotic South American flower, the water hyacinth, was introduced in this country because of its beauty. It soon turned out to be a noxious pest because it multiplies with astonishing speed. A dozen small hyacinths can increase to a solid acre of closely intertwined plants that form a mat so dense that it weighs a couple of hundred tons.

Because of air-filled bladders, the size of ping-pong balls at the base of the plant, it is very buoyant. Such a growth covers a body of water in the way a crust covers a pie. This serves as a seal that shuts out air, resulting in the suffocation of fish and other marine life. Moreover, it impedes navigation in streams and waterways. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been invested in efforts to eradicate it without success.

—Selected

7077 Stopping The Train

Sometime ago wet leaves on the tracks of the New Haven Railroad stalled a 100-car freight. They caused the wheels of the diesel engines to spin, and without any traction, the locomotives were unable to move. A landslide of huge boulders could not have been more effective in stopping that train.

—Paul R. Van Gorder

7078 What Burbank Did

Several years ago a widely-distributed advertisement of the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company presented this stirring interpretation of American independence:

There was once a man who loved Nature with such a deep and moving love that she told him one of her secrets. She gave him the power to create new plants.

The man, whose name was Luther Burbank, would go into his garden and walk softly among the growing things therein.

He saw that every plant was a child. It had its own face, its own promise, its unique touch of genius or character. And if that promise were tended and encouraged, the plant would grow more useful and beautiful each year. Luther Burbank puttered in his garden for fifty years for the greater happiness of all people.

He made potatoes grow larger, whiter, more delicious than they had ever been. He taught the cactus of the desert to throw away its spines, so that cattle could fatten upon it, and made the blackberry shed its thorns, so it would not cut the fingers of the pickers.

For him, the plum grew without pits, and strawberries ripened all year. Trees learned to shelter their fruit from frost, and walnuts wore thinner shells which the small hands of children could open.

The daisy grew more beautiful for him, and the amaryllis burst into flame; the calla lily wore perfume, and the dahlia found new fragrance. He left the earth covered with flowers and fruits that no one had ever attempted to grow before. And all because he knew a secret.

He knew that everything that lives has the power to become greater.

See also: Trees.