sweet perfume and its pollen to attract friendly visitors. These pollen threads are very ready to drop their yellow dust and broaden into petals. And they are just as ready to turn back again. If the seeds of the finest, double garden roses are planted, they sometimes forget all their long training, and go back to the single-petaled blossom and straggling canes of the wild rose. They have to be grown from cuttings to keep them tamed.
Left alone, nature might never have made one of our double roses of the garden. She doesn't seem to care to make the flower better. All she thinks about is the seed. As the rose must depend upon birds to scatter her seeds, she tries to see how tempting she can make the fruit, so the birds will be sure to eat it. When the pink petals fall, the seed cup swells and closes its mouth, leaving those five sepal scales to turn dry and brown at the top of the red hip. The rose hip is too hard for some seed-eating birds to manage in their little insides, so one member of the rose family made the soft, sweet, seed-filled fruit of the blackberry. Another one made the raspberry.
Yes, those plants are cousins of the rose. They have the same bright-barked, thorny, woody stems; the same spiny, compound leaves, and the many five-petaled rosette flowers, with forests of pollen-tipped hairs in them. In the briar berries the blossoms are white and the pollen dark. Down in the grass nature set the same white, rose-blossom on a creeping vine, and scattered the hard seeds on the outside of a sweet fruit, like stitches of yellow silk on a red satin cone—the strawberry!
Of course, no one knows which of all the rose family came first. Very likely it was the little yellow-flowered cinquefoil that looks so much like a wild strawberry. Beside making seeds it also grows by runners, that strike root at the joints. So does the strawberry. If raspberry and blackberry canes are bent over to the ground, they will often strike root, and start new plants. And branches of roses, and many of their cousins, can be grafted on other root stocks. So can the branches of orchard fruit trees be grafted.
How much the apple blossom looks like the wild rose. It has five pink petals set in a rosette. It has a little forest of pollen hairs, too. When the petals fall the seed case swells and closes at the top and leaves, at the flower end, five little dry, brown sepals. The leaves of the apple tree are furry on the under side, the bark of the tree is smooth and bright, and the wild apples—the hawthorns and
