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Show How House Plants Die of Loneliness and Starvation NEARLY every one. at some time or other, has bought a plant for the house, usually a potted fern. These plants often live only a month or so and then die, in spite of the care that may be lavished on them, and few housekeepers house-keepers know the cause of their failure in making the plants grow. Little do they realize that many house-plants die of sheer homesickness, lonely for their plant friends and associates, and dispirited dis-pirited in Isolation. No plant in natural surroundings grows alone. In its wild stale it is surrounded toy friends and enemies. It has to fight for its share of the mineral wealth of the soil from the encroaching roots of other plants, it has to grow and spread sufficiently to secure its supply of sunlight sun-light and air. or it will lose in life's race. Insects visit and pollinate its flowers if it he a flowering plant and the surface of the earth may be protected from exposure to the drying effect of the air by foliage, if it be in a field, or perhaps per-haps by a mantle of decayed leaves, as where ferns grow in a wood. In the house the transplanted plant haB none of these. It grows alone.' No refreshing re-freshing wind comes to it, except a blast from a steam radiator or the draught from an open window on a city street; no insect visitors come, except perhaps the parasitic aphides: and. instead of ihe gentle, life-giving rain, the house plant has to bo satisfied with water poured from a jut:. What wrjir rj? and grieves, and in spite of all attendance attend-ance droops, withers and dies! One of the chief reasons why house plants often fail to thrive is a lack of food in the air and in water. A large part of the food of all vegetable life is carbon. This is secured by a plant from the carbon dioxide in the air by a process which is known as "photo-synthesis." In brief, this is a method by which the chlorophyll, or green coloring matter of the leaf, in combination with sunlight, breaks down the molecules of carbon dioxide and uses the carbon in connection connec-tion with water that has been brought up by the roots to form a carbo-hydrate, while some oxygen is released in the process. pro-cess. The stronger the light the more rapid is this transformation. Or, to put the matter another way, the stronger is the light, the more the plant gets to eat. As a plant grows almost indefinitely, as long as it has enough to eat, it follows that the lack of light in a house is one cf the ways in which a plant is starved. Let any one who fails to realize how little lit-tle light there is in our houses try aud take a snapshot with an ordinary camera indoors! Wliere an exposure of one hundredth hun-dredth part of a second is enough in the sun and one twenty-fifth is enough under a gray sky, on the table where the plant stands an exposure may need to be from half a minute to two minutes, according to window space. Thus, even at the lowest low-est estimate, that of half a minute, a plaDt will get three thousand times as mt;; ligJ fr ?""r' -"j-j-'ng tj-o and seven hundred times as much in the shade as it will inside a house. In Nature a plant sucks up water from below. The earth is consistently moist. The roots of a plant draw up almost as much water three days after a rain as they do at the time the rain is actually falling. The water (holding various necessary nec-essary minerals in solutions) is being fed as sap to the plant constantly. In tlie case of a house plant the pot is neither deep enough nor big enough to contain sufficient earth to hold moisture at about the same pressure. It is either a case of a feast or a famine. To remember re-member to water the plants only when they begin to droop is like waiting to give a man something to eat until he faints from hunger. True, you may be able to keep him half alive that way, but it will wreck his constitution. It also wrecks that of a plant. Neither is well water, or water from a faucet (which probably has been filtered in some way, either at the reservoirs or elsewhere) of the same value as rain water. Soft rain water, pattering on the leaves, and falling to the ground beneath be-neath carries down with it many microscopic micro-scopic particles of fertilizing material. Water from the faucet brings noue of these, but, usually, being poured from a jug until the top of tlie pot is full, it cakes the earth on the surface and prevents pre-vents the earth from breathing. And a large part of a plant's food is from air iT" .-.'goned in the earth. C21)vrlKit.,2Io.bv tliisi;i-i: tZcg?.?. |