Gray's school and field book of botany : consisting of "Lessons in botany" and "Field, forest, and garden botany" / by Asa Gray.

  • Asa Gray
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gray's school and field book of botany : consisting of "Lessons in botany" and "Field, forest, and garden botany" / by Asa Gray. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    LESSON 7.J THICKENED AND FLESHY LEAVES. farther on, it is contracted into a tendril, enabling the plant to climb ; the end of this tendril is then expanded into a pitcher, of five or six inches in length, and on the end of this is a lid, which exactly closes the mouth of the pitcher until after it is full grown, when the lid opens by a liinge ! liut the whole is only one leaf. 128. So in the root-leaves of the Tulip or the Lily (Fig. 75), while the green leaf is preparing nourishment throughout the grow- ing season, its base under ground is thickened into a reservoir tor storing up a good part of the nourishment for next year’s use. 129. Finally, the whole leaf often serves both as foliage, to pre- pare nourishment, and as a depository to store it up. This takes place in all fleshy-leaved plants, such as the Honseleek, the Ice- plant, and various sorts of Mesembryanthemum, in the Live-for-ever of the gardens to some extent, and very strikingly in the Aloe, and in the Century-plant. In the latter it is only the green surface of tltese large and thick leaves (of three to five feet in length on a 6trong plant, and often three to six inches thick nenr the base) which acts as foliage ; the whole interior is white, like the interior of a ]>otato, and almost as heavily loaded with starch and other nourish- ing matter. (Fig. 82 represents a young Century-plant, Agave Americana.) M 5 *
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