No feature of a landscape gives us more pleasure than its flowers, over which poets have sung and artists have painted their most charming pictures, even a musician has composed a very beautiful piano piece, “To a Water Lily.” But their true place in the scheme of nature has a deeper significance: the wonderful color and symmetry of their parts, the plan of their arrangement, their transformation into curious forms, like the Madagascar orchid, and hundreds of others--all these point to their supreme function, an act of self-sacrifice comparable only to the fall of a leaf when its task is done. Petals, too, wither and die when the fertilized ovary, already a mother, begins the slow process of maturing its young and the end of the flowering stage is reached. Such a climax is this in certain plants that the whole plant dies, as we have already noted in the case of the century plant. The toddy or wine palm of India, often sixty or seventy years old and more than a hundred feet tall, flowers only once, and, as if in recognition of the fact that it has done that for which it grew, slowly dies as the seed ripens. More humble _annuals_, like buckwheat, and hundreds of others, live only one brief growing season, produce flowers and seeds, and then die, leaving behind them the only means of perpetuating their kind. The dormant seed carries over the winter the life they were themselves unable to maintain, as perennials and woody plants do in their buds. THE FRUIT The number of different kinds of fruits that one can buy even in the greatest markets in the world is so small, compared to all fruits that are annually produced by plants, that they might almost be likened to an ear of corn as against a Missouri cornfield. If, as we have seen, all flowering plants must produce fruits, then what we commonly call such can be only a fraction of what actually makes up nature’s annual harvest. It follows that fruits often occur in unfamiliar disguises and, as we shall see presently, some of the things we have been calling fruits may be so only partly, if at all. Disregarding what we call fruits and looking at it from the plant’s point of view, a fruit is anything in which, or upon which, a seed is developed or ripened quite without regard as to whether it is edible by man or not. As the ovary is the female organ of reproduction and contains the yet undeveloped seed, it follows also that fruits are practically always a development of some part or modification of the ovary or the upper end of the flower stalk upon which it rests and from which it is often scarcely separable.