VALUE OF A KNOWLEDGE OF THE FLOWER

Many times it happens that a farmer or a gardener wants to start a strawberry bed and buys plants of a variety of berries that have the reputation of being very productive.  He plants them and cultivates them carefully, and at the proper time they blossom very freely, and there is promise of a large crop, yet very few berries appear and this continues to be the case.  Not satisfied with them he buys another variety and plants near them, and after that the old bed becomes very productive.  Now why is this?  It happens that the flowers of some varieties of strawberries have a great many pistils but no stamens, or very few stamens, and there is not pollen enough to fertilize all of the blossoms, and when such a variety is planted it is necessary to plant near it some variety that produces many stamens and therefore pollen enough to fertilize both varieties in order to be sure of a crop.  Those strawberries which produce flowers with only pistils are called pistilate varieties, while those with both stamens and pistils are called perfect varieties (Fig. 78).  In planting them there should be at least one row of a perfect variety to every four or five pistilate rows.

[Illustration:  FIG. 74.  A magnolia flower showing central column of pistils and stamens, the pistils being above and the stamens below them.]

[Illustration:  FIG. 75.—­FLOWERS OF SQUASH. A, pistillate flower; B, staminate flower.  A means of insuring cross-pollination.]

We have learned that certain varieties of plums cannot be fertilized by pollen from the same variety, and to make them fruitful some other variety must be planted among them to produce pollen that will make them fruitful.  This is more or less true of all our fruits.  Therefore it is not best generally to plant one variety of fruit by itself.  Not knowing this some orchardists have planted large blocks of a single variety of fruit which has been unfruitful till some other varieties have been planted near them or among them.

A knowledge of the necessity of pollination is very important to those gardeners who grow cucumbers, tomatoes, melons and other fruiting plants in greenhouses.  Here in most cases the pollination is done by hand.

We noticed that nature provides that most of the flowers shall be cross pollinated.  This is particularly true of the flowers of the fruit trees, and for this reason it is impossible to get true varieties of fruit from seed.  For example, if we plant seeds of the wine sap apple, the new trees produced from them will not produce the same kind of apple but each tree will produce something different and they will very likely all be poorer than the parent fruit.  This is because of the mixture of pollens which fertilize the pistils.  Knowing this fact the nurseryman plants apple seeds and grows apple seedlings.  When these get to be the size of a lead pencil he grafts them, that is, he digs them up, cuts off the tops away down to the root and then takes twigs from the variety he wishes to grow and sets or splices these twigs in the roots of the seedlings and then plants them.  The root and the new top unite and produce a tree that bears the same kind of fruit as that produced by the tree from which the twig was taken.