The plants

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 Excerpt: ...are in the same blossom. But it is not often in the threefold flowers that we get the calyx green and the corolla coloured, as in these simple and very early types. Most often in this great group of plants the calyx and corolla are both brightly coloured, and both alike employed as effective advertisements. A good case of this sort is shown in the flowering-rush, a close relation of the arrowhead and the waterplantain, but a more advanced and developed plant than either of them. Here the calyx and corolla, instead of forming two separate rows, are telescoped into one, as it were, and are both rose-coloured. In such cases we speak of the combined calyx and corolla as the perianth (another long word, with which I'm sorry to trouble you). In such perianths, however, even when all the pieces are of the same size and are similarly coloured, you can see if you look close that three of them are outside and alternate with the others; and these three are really the calyx in disguise, got up as a corolla. (An excellent example of this arrangement is afforded by the common garden tulip.) Inside its six rose-coloured perianth-pieces, the flowering-rush has nine stamens, arranged in three rows of three stamens each. Finally, in the centre, it has six carpels, equally arranged in two rows of three. Here the threefold architectural ground-plan of the flower is very apparent. You may say, in short, that the original scheme of the two great groups is something like this: five sepals, five petals, five stamens, five carpels; or else, three sepals, three petals, three stamens, three carpels. But in any instance there may be two or more such rows of any organ, especially of the stamens; in any instance certain parts may be reduced in number or entirely suppressed; and in any i...