Dear Children,--If you were old enough to go to the bookseller and ask
for a book that would tell you about the flowers you see growing in the
woods and fields in spring and summer-time, you would find there were
already a great many books which had been written with that purpose.
If you examined a few of these books, you would discover that in many
the pictures of the flowers were not coloured, and that in these books
the flowers were very difficult to recognise. And I think you would at
once tell the bookseller you wished a flower-book with coloured
pictures, where the flowers looked like real flowers.
Then you would examine more books, some of which have beautiful coloured
pictures showing every flower that grows in our country. These books are
very large and cost a great deal of money. You would see, too, quite
small books which said they could tell about the common flowers we find
in our country walks. And I think you would buy one of these.
But next day, suppose you were to find a bright blue flower growing in
the field, and wished very much to know what it was called. You would
open the flower-book and begin to look at the pictures, and there you
would discover that the first picture showed a yellow flower, the next
a red, the third a purple, a white or a blue, and you might have to turn
over all the pages in the book before you found the flower you sought.
After you had looked at the picture of your blue flower, I think you
would wish to know something more about the flower, and would like to
read the writing to find out what it said.
But I am afraid you would not be able to understand what the flower-book
told. There would be such long words telling about things you had never
heard of, and you would begin to wonder if only older people could find
out what books had to say about flowers.
Now this new flower-book is written just for the purpose of telling
little children about the flowers. And in order to make it easy, the
blue flowers have all been put together in one part of the book, the
yellow in another, and the white in a third group; so you can at once
know in what part of the book you will see a picture of any flower you
find.
And I have made the writing which tells about each flower very easy,
with as few new words as possible, so I hope you will be able to read it
yourself, and find out how many wonderful and beautiful things there are
in the flower-world which you might not notice unless you were told what
to look for.
There are four new words you must learn to understand before you begin
to read this book.
The first word is CALYX, and it means a covering. When the flowers are
still babies, or buds, as they are called in flowerland, they are so
soft and tender that too much rain, or a cold wind or a night of frost
would do them harm. So nearly every flower has been given a warm
covering which is folded closely round the tiny bud to protect it.
Sometimes this calyx, or covering, is all in one piece like a cup, and
the bud sits safely inside. But very often it is made up of five or six
or more pieces, and when this is the case, these separate pieces are
called sepals.
These SEPALS are very often green, like leaves, but you may have white
sepals, or yellow sepals, or blue sepals or pink sepals. You will learn
all about them after you know all that is in this flower-book and are
able to read a more difficult one.
The third new word you must know the meaning of, is PETALS. Nearly every
flower has petals. They are the beautiful coloured leaves of the flower
that are within the calyx. It is these lovely petals, pink in the rose,
yellow in the buttercup, red in the poppy, and blue in the
forget-me-not, that most of us mean when we talk of flowers, and it is
these soft, silky petals which attract us, and not us only, but the
birds and the bees and the butterflies, which all visit the gay flowers.
These petals are among the most beautiful things in this wonderful
world.
The fourth new word you must try to remember is STAMENS. The stamens
are not very attractive, but they are very important to the flower, as
without them there could be no new seeds, and if there were no new seeds
we should presently have no more flowers.
The stamens are usually fine, slender threads which grow either singly,
or in little bunches or in a ring within the circle of petals. Each
slender thread has a fat little head at the end, a purple head, or a
pink head, or a red head, or, very often, a yellow head. And this stamen
head is filled with fine powder which is needed to make the new seeds
grow.
These four, CALYX, SEPALS, PETALS, and STAMENS, are the only new words
you will have to learn in order to understand all that is written in
this little flower-book, and I hope that, when summer comes, you will
try to find all the plants that I have written about here, and that you
will be able to tell the names, without reading them, of every flower of
which Miss Kelman has made you a picture.--Yours sincerely,