Part 6

But there will be more morning-glories, for the vine has stored some of its life in the seeds, and they will not fade and cease to work. All that is left of the life of the vine is in the seeds. All the morning-glories that will grow and delight us with their bright flowers next summer lie packed away in the dark seeds.

Dear little seeds, live on through the cold winter; without you we never again could see our bright morning-glories!

And that is why the vines take such care of the seeds; the whole race of morning-glories is in their keeping.

THE LEAVES.

The leaves of the morning-glory consider each other. They stand close together, but, as you see, they do not crowd.

They turn a little to one side that all may have as much room as possible, for each needs all the light and air it can get.

The leaves also have regard for the roots working away in the dark earth. Instead of being flat, they have a channel down the middle, a gutter to convey the rain water from leaf to leaf, and finally to the ground above the roots.

Some of the roots, it is true, stray away, but some stay close to the plant and suck up the rain the leaves send them.

The young leaves fold together. They are very tender, and too much cold or too much heat would harm them; and if they were open, the sun would draw away too much of their water.

So they lie close and snug, and do not open until they have grown large and strong enough to meet the bright sunshine and the cold night.

Then they open wide; they become green and do their work, which is to make food for the plant.

TO THE MORNING-GLORY.

What do you do with your pollen so white? What do you do with your honey so sweet? What is the use of your border so bright? And what is the use of your calyx so neat?

THE CONVOLVULUS FAMILY.

This is a large and, on the whole, aristocratic family.

About two thousand different kinds of plants belong to it; but not so many in our climate. Perhaps not more than two hundred of the Convolvulaceæ, which is the proper name of this family, come as far North as we live.

They are rather cold-blooded people, these Convolvulaceæ, and prefer to stay in or near the tropics.

Up our way are the morning-glories, as you know. This is not their native home, though, as it is of the bloodroots, the bindweeds, and all the other wild flowers.

They were brought here from the hot part of America, near the equator. Somebody saw them, no doubt, and of course fell in love with them and sent some seeds to their friends in the North, or else took them when they went home.

Perhaps a sailor boy, landing in South America and seeing the bright flowers in the morning sunshine, thought of the New England village where he lived and which he often longed for there in that strange hot country, and perhaps he sent the seeds of these bright flowers home in a letter. But whoever may have sent the first seeds, it is certain the morning-glories received a hearty welcome in our Northern world. And they soon behaved like old settlers.

They grew cheerily where they were planted, and their seeds fell to the ground, where they managed to survive the cold Northern winter.

This must have been a great surprise to them the first time they felt it!

Then up they came in the spring just as though they were at home. They even strayed away from the people’s gardens and grew wild near the villages.

Perhaps they met their Northern cousins the bindweeds there. And what a surprise that must have been,—to come up from South America and find a member of one’s own family who had always lived in the cold North!

See how astonished the morning-glory at the bottom of the page looks as it gazes upon its cousin the bindweed!

For the bindweeds, you must know, are like the bloodroots and mandrakes and other wild flowers; they are natives of our Northern climate.

There are several kinds of bindweeds just as there are several kinds of morning-glories; but they are all, morning-glories and bindweeds alike, descended from some way-back convolvulus ancestor, just as you and your cousins and your second cousins and your third cousins and your fourteenth cousins are all descended from the same great, great, great, way-back grandfather.

There is another member of the Convolvulus Family with which we are all pretty well acquainted, and that is our little red-flowered cypress vine. You remember it, with its feathery leaves which we train over trellises in our flower gardens.