Handbook of Nature-Study · Lesson CLXI · Topic 24: Summer and fall garden flowers
161. The bachelor's button
Goal: Your child uses the composite outline on a bachelor's button and finds that its showy edge-flowers are trumpets with no seeds.
You'll need
- Nature notebook, pencil and colored pencils
- A hand lens (magnifying glass)
- Bachelor's buttons (cornflowers) from a garden
- Tweezers or a toothpick
What's in the book
A Teacher's Story about the bachelor's button, or cornflower, with drawings of its florets. The lesson is a one-line Leading thought that sends you to the outline in Lesson CXXXV.
The lesson, step by step
When and where
Bachelor's buttons bloom through summer in gardens, and sometimes escape to roadsides. They grow easily from seed. The Teacher's Story says they came from Europe, where they are called cornflowers.
The leading thought
Each bachelor's button is made up of many little flowers which may be studied by the outline given in Lesson CXXXV.
Trumpets, not banners
Read from the Teacher's Story:
The ray-flowers are tubular but they do not have banners. Their tubes flare open like trumpets, and they are indeed color trumpets heralding to the insect world that there is nectar for the probing and pollen for exchange.
Pull out one edge-flower and look at it with the lens.
No pistils
Has the banner-flower any stigma or stamens?
Comstock's answer:
but though we search each trumpet to its slender depths we can find no pistils.
The center and the shingles
How many banner-flowers are there in the flower family you are studying?
Describe the shape of these bracts. Are they set in regular, overlapping rows?
The Teacher's Story says the edge-flowers number from 7 to 14 or more, and each bract has a scaly fringe.
Nature notebook
Draw one trumpet edge-flower and one disk-flower enlarged, and the whole flower-head from the side showing its fringed shingles.