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Plants and their children

Chapter 84: ANOTHER COUSIN
By Frances Theodora Parsons
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Children & Young Adult ReadingNature/Gardening/AnimalsTeaching & Education

About This Book

The book is a child-focused natural history that guides readers through fruits, seeds, young plants, roots and stems, buds, leaves, and flowers across the school year, combining simple explanations of plant structure and reproduction, seed dispersal methods, and physiological processes with seasonal observation exercises and classroom activities. It emphasizes hands-on collection, identification, and experiments, describes common plant families and adaptations, and offers teachers practical arrangements and illustrations to develop observational habits and an enduring interest in nature.

ANOTHER COUSIN

Fig. 250

Here we see a branch from the raspberry bush (Fig. 250). How is the raspberry unlike both strawberry and blackberry? Let us place side by side these three berries (Figs. 251, 252, 253).

Fig. 251 Fig. 252 Fig. 253

Once more we observe that the strawberry is the flat flower cushion grown big and juicy.

Again we see that the seedboxes of the blackberry packed upon the swollen flower cushion make up much of the fruit.

But in the raspberry we find that the red, ripe seedboxes alone make the berry which is so good to eat.

When we pick this raspberry, we find that the flower cushion remains upon the plant, instead of coming off in our fingers and helping to make a luscious morsel, as with the other two fruits (Figs. 254, 255).

Fig. 254

Fig. 255

I hope you will remember how these three berries differ one from another.

Why the blossoms of these three plants grow into berries in three different ways, we do not know; but our time has been well spent if we remember that they do change in these three ways.

The more we see and question and learn, the more pleasure we shall find in our own lives, and the better able we shall be to make life pleasant for others.