Plants and How They Grow is a Ladybird Natural History Book by F E Newing, Bsc & Richard Bowood with illustrations by Ronald Lampitt and is part of series 651.
"A plant is any member of the vegetable kingdom. Everything which grows in the ground is a plant: flowers and vegetables, grass and ferns, bushes and trees. In this book we shall find out about plants and the wonder of growth; how they grow, feed, live and reproduce themselves."
This is a book that I bought from a charity shop a few years ago. We have an allotment as well as a small garden and I am an avid (though untidy and unskilled) gardener and have many gardening books. This book however approaches plants from the stance of a botanist.
It defines the parts and process of a plant, it's growth and survival.
Roots, stems, buds, leaves, flowers, fruit and seeds are examined, and their role in the plants structure and lifecycle illustrated with simply experiments.
Food, warmth and light are defined as the essentials for life and experiments to demonstrate this described.
The different types of plants are also shown; trees, ferns and mosses, water plants, grasses etc, along with fungi, which I'm sure I was taught in biology was not a plant at all.
My favourite page is the above, on parasites and the sundew, mostly because I love mistletoe and have always wanted to grow carnivorous plants. I'm impressed that this group of plants is covered, it's a good choice as I think they are such interesting plants, likely to capture a child's imagination and spark an interest in plants that could last a lifetime.
The final page recommends botany as a hobby; "There is no end to the delight in finding out about plants, from the smallest wildflower to the greatest tree, and getting to know their species and their ways."
I had forgotten how good this book was at explaining the wonder of living nature and suggesting ways to explore, observe and record it. My little Una Fox loves helping on the allotment and in the garden, has a little flower press that she got for her birthday last year and already loves taking photos of flowers, maybe I will suggest we make a little project of this - Let Operation Botanist Fox commence...
This post is part of Ladybird Tuesday started on the Being Mrs C blog, take a look at her posts here.
The rest of Mrs Fox's Ladybird Tuesday posts are here and if you have a collection of Ladybird books, please do feel free to join in.
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