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Blossoms
 Blossoms
And the Genes That Make Them

MAXINE F. SINGER

1
 1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Maxine F. Singer 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947207
ISBN 978–0–19–881113–8
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
For Luna, Kapp, Elliot, and Emma,
and the gardens they will cherish.
 ACK NOWLED GEMENTS

The stories in this book are based on the published scientific work
of many extraordinary scientists. I have not associated their names
with the discoveries chronicled in this book. According to con-
temporary publishing habits in biology, the name of the senior
person in the laboratory is usually last in the list of authors. Often,
the work is, nevertheless, identified by and credited to that per-
son’s name. Forgotten in this method are the several students and
postdoctoral fellows who actually did the laboratory and green-
house work under the direction and inspiration of the senior scien-
tist. That senior is also responsible for obtaining the financial
resources required for the work. I am indebted to the published
scientific papers of all these scientists for teaching me about flow-
ering and making it possible to share their stories with readers.
Elliot Meyerowitz at Caltech is a leading plant biologist whose
work has had a major influence on scientific descriptions of flow-
ering. His generosity with ideas and clarifications has been a great
help to me as I educated myself into the marvelous stories about
blossoming. I am very grateful for his advice; it helped me clarify
some complex mechanisms. I thank Laura Youman Debole for the
lovely line drawings that grace this book.
I also thank my colleague Susanne Garvey at the Carnegie
Institution for Science for reading the whole manuscript and pro-
viding suggestions. She is one of those rare humanists who knows
how to read science.
 Ack n o w l ed gemen t s

Any errors that remain in the text are my own doing.

Finally, I thank my friend of many decades, Naomi Felsenfeld,
for being a great companion as a knowledgeable wild flower
hunter. She does insist on one very helpful caution, namely, not to
bother trying to identify the many small, daisy like flowers. She
says the same thing about small brown birds . . . but birds are her
thing, not mine.

viii
 CONTENTS

Introduction 1

PA RT I
What Plants Are and What They Can Do
1. Names 13
2. Plants are Like Animals, Only Different 21
3. Sensing the Environment 27

PA RT I I
How Genes Work
4. How Genes Work 41
5. Switching Genes On and Off 53

PA RT I I I
Time to Flower
6. Growing Up Green 67
7. Warm and Cold 73
8. Light and Dark 83
 Co n t en t s

PA RT I V
Shaping a Flower
9. The Construction Site 93
10. Special Shapes 103

PA RT V
Decorating a Flower
11. Painting the Petals 117
12. The Perfume Factory 131

A Final Word 147

Glossary 149
Further Reading 153
Publisher Acknowledgements 155
Picture Credits 157
Index 159

x
Plate 1: Reproductive structures within a flower. Stamens carrying
pollen surround the central carpel, which ends in the stigma.

Plate 2: A crocus with veined, coloured sepals, like petals

(left) compared with typical green sepals, here in a sunflower (right).
 Plate 3: Hummingbird with its long beak in a red monkey flower
(Mimulus cardinalis).

Plate 4: The extended petal of a bee orchid (Ophrys apifera) mimics the
appearance of a bee, attracting male bees as pollinators.
 Plate 5: (left) Butter-and-eggs plant (Linaria vulgaris), and
(right) close-up of its relative, the snapdragon (Antirrhinum).
The petals of these flowers are fused to form a tube.

Plate 6: Close-up of portion of an oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare),

a compound flower, showing the central disc flowers,
surrounded by white ray flowers.
Plate 7: Normal sunflower (Helianthus) with ray flowers surrounding
a head of dense disc flowers (left), and a mutant form with
almost entirely ray flowers (right).

Plate 8: The two

yellow markings of the
monkey flower
(Mimulus lewisii) guide
bees into the
flower.

Plate 9: White azalea

with pink streaks and
spots. Such random
coloured markings can
result from jumping
genes that block the
production of
anthocyanins in some
parts of the petal but
not in others.
 INTRODUCTION

Sometimes, again, you see them occupied for hours together in

spoiling a pretty flower with pointed instruments, out of a stupid
curiosity to know what the flower is made of. Is its colour any prettier
or its scent any sweeter, when you know?
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)

W ho doesn’t love flowers? Bright blossoms enhance the

everyday lives of many all over the world. Even the dirt
yards around shacks in the poorest slums often have an old oil
barrel splendid with plants in bloom. The first things many children
draw are brightly colored flowers with a yellow sun shining down
upon them; somehow, they realize that light is important. Artists
never outgrow this desire to illustrate nature. For centuries they have
painted wild flowers and masses of bright blooms in vases. But
how many of us have wondered how a real plant makes a flower?
Over the past few decades, scientists have been working on just
that. Thanks to modern methods of genetics and biochemistry,
and the use of a tiny weed called thale cress or mouse cress, or,
more formally, Arabidopsis thaliana, we can now tell the remarkable
story of when and how a plant makes a flower. Botanists have
answered Wilkie Collins’ complaint with proof that it’s not just
Feynman’s Jupiter that is wondrous.
This story could not have been written thirty years ago. Then,
no one knew how and when a plant begins to make a flower. No
 In t ro d u c t i o n

one knew how, at an appropriate time, plants decorate themselves

with colorful and perfumed blossoms.
Flowers did not evolve for our pleasure. Their purpose is to ensure
the production of seeds. The more seeds, the more new plants can
be made, as long as the environment is hospitable and provides
light, water, and nutrients. They evolved to optimize seed produc-
tion by attracting insects or birds through the color, fragrance,
and form of their flowers. These visiting animals pick up pollen
and then spread the pollen so it can fertilize a plant’s egg that then
forms seeds. The egg can be in the same flower or in another flower
of the same species. Some plants have no need of pollinators; they
spread their pollen on the winds.
Flowers matter to us for much more than their beauty. They are
the source of food for humans and animals. The staples of human
diets, worldwide, are seeds including rice, corn, wheat, and beans.
The fruits that carry seeds are another major food source: fruits
such as tomatoes, squash, apples, oranges, and so many others.
Flowers are also big business. That industry goes back at least to
Roman times, and is behind every flower we see in a flower shop
and every plant that fills nurseries. As long ago as the sixteenth
century, tulips imported from the Ottoman Empire were the buzz
of Europe. By the middle of the next century, Holland was con-
sumed by tulipomania. Speculators dealt in tulip bulbs, not stock.
Frenzied collectors mortgaged houses, estates, even their horses
to pay for tulips long before the bulbs were actually available. But,
like a stock market, the tulip market eventually crashed. The tulip
stock had been destroyed by a virus.
Today, flowers are a multibillion dollar global industry. In the
USA in 2005, people spent, on average, almost $26 a person on
flowers, a lot less than in most European countries. The Swiss are

2
 In t ro d u c t i o n

the biggest spenders, at almost four times US outlays. It’s no won-

der that flower growers spend considerable sums to ship fresh
flowers worldwide by air; they know there is a good market. Most
of the cut flowers in US flower shops come from Latin America.
Big flower shows, like the annual one in Philadelphia, can bring
billions of tourist dollars to a city. The science behind flowering
matters for agriculture and industry too.

* * *

In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the city of Brno, in what

is now the Czech Republic, the monk Gregor Mendel experimented
with plants. He learned that seeds contained information, what he
called “factors,” for making a plant as well as determining the color
of the flowers and the shape of the seeds. Today, we call those fac-
tors genes. And we know that genes determine not only the color
of the flowers but their shapes, their various parts, their perfumes,
and even when a plant will form flowers. We also know that genes, be
they in plants or animals, bacteria or viruses, are parts of DNA, that
beautiful double helical molecule that became an icon of the
twentieth century. Questions about when and how a plant makes
flowers found answers in genes and DNA. This book tells the story
of what we know so far about how it all works.
It’s too bad that most people learn about genes from the media,
which usually report only problematic genes that cause human
disease or the imagined dangers associated with genetically modi-
fied plants. That gives genes a bad name. They deserve a better
press. After all, they are also responsible for the beauty of roses
and the scent of jasmine.
Flowers appeared quite late in the evolution of life on planet
Earth. According to the fossil record, land plants themselves

3
 In t ro d u c t i o n

appeared only about 500 million years ago. The earliest flower fos-
sils date to about 130 million years ago. But because flowers are
fragile, and likely to decay before fossils can form, they may have
evolved a little earlier but not been preserved. Still, flowering
plants have been amazingly successful; they occupy all sorts of
habitats on Earth, from the frigid polar regions to the tropics, from
lowlands to mountain tops. And their diversity of color, shape,
and perfume is dazzling.
Charles Darwin, knowing nothing of genes and how they drive
evolution, found only frustration in the diversity of flowers. He
described the history of flowers on Earth as “an abominable mys-
tery.” He might be pleased to learn that a lot of the mystery has
been cleared up by new fossil finds, and especially by the study of
DNA. It seems likely that the ancestors of flowering plants were
ferns. The flowering bush called Amborella, which grows on a
South Pacific Island, seems to be closely related to the most ancient
ancestor of existing flowering plants. Water lilies are the most
ancient kind of plant most of us are likely to see.
Once begun, the evolution of flowering plants followed the same
kind of scenario as the evolution of animals. Genes in flowering
plants are constantly turning up new varieties, because mutations
arise in their DNA as a result of radiation, exposure to particular
chemicals, or mistakes made in copying the DNA when cells
divide. If those changes result in traits that prove to be an advan-
tage for the plant in its particular environment or that in which its
seeds land, the altered genes will be passed on to new generations
of plants. If the mutations make the plant less fit for its environ-
ment, the plant may die without leaving seeds carrying the altered
genes. In this way, new varieties and, eventually, new species that
are well adapted to their environments arise and flourish—at least

4
 In t ro d u c t i o n

while that environment lasts. That, in short, is natural selection.

Over more than 100 million years, this process, together with
changing climates and evolving animals, have resulted in the huge
variety of flowering plants on Earth.
All the elements of a flower are the consequence of the genes
packaged into the plant’s seeds. Like animal sex, the scheme is
circular: genes build the plant and its flowers so that those same
genes are preserved in seeds that can make more plants and flow-
ers. Flowers are the sex organs of plants.
An artist pondering painting a flower may consider what kind
of flower it might be, what colors, what shape and size, how many
petals? The choices available to an artist are restricted by his imag-
ination and the materials available. The choices available to a plant
are restricted by its genes.
Being a city person, I was entering middle age before I came to
appreciate gardens and flowers. It was even later, after a few sum-
mers in the mountains of Idaho, before I paid serious attention to
wild flowers. But I knew about genes and DNA long before that.
They have been at the center of more than 50 years of my own
scientific research, although that work concerned the genes of
bacteria, viruses, and animals, not plants.
Long before anyone knew about genes, they knew that plants
sometimes grew with unexpected characteristics. For millennia,
farmers and gardeners took advantage of the new properties to
improve food crops and the appeal and diversity of cultivated
flowers. They learned that seeds taken from the unusual plants
would grow into similarly unusual offspring. They selected and
saved those seeds. Such artificial selection was a model for Darwin’s
proposal of natural selection as the mechanism for evolution in
nature. All this made a lot more sense when Mendel discovered

5
 In t ro d u c t i o n

genes. Although they were contemporaries in time, Darwin never

learned about Mendel’s experiments. That was really too bad,
because genes solved one of Darwin’s conundrums: what causes
the variety upon which natural selection works?
One way in which the genes in seeds may be different from
those in the plant that made them is if the plant was pollinated by
pollen from another, related plant, rather than from its own pol-
len. If the two plants are entirely different species, they are not
likely to be cross-pollinated at all. But chance mutations in the
genes of two plants of the same species give rise to plants whose
genes are slightly different from those in either parent. Even if the
plant self-pollinates, the genes in the egg and those in the pollen
can differ somewhat from one another. In this way, the seeds from
pink-flowered plants may, for example, produce new plants with
white flowers or even white flowers with pink spots. Evolution
takes advantage of these changes to produce diversity.
Part I of this book introduces some of the ideas that underlie the
science that follows. Stories about what genes are and how they
work, derived from research, form Part II. Part III describes how a
plant knows when it is time to flower. Part IV is concerned with how
plants construct flowers, while Part V summarizes the ways in which
a plant decorates its flowers so as to attract pollinators. Readers will
encounter some new concepts and unfamiliar terms, because that
is the only way we can talk about new ideas or newly discovered
genes and processes. The key new words that will crop up from
time to time are in bold print; their definitions are in the glossary.
The steps and processes behind the making of a flower are not
always logical and some may seem unnecessarily complex. This is
because evolution is undirected, haphazard, and often inefficient;
it can take advantage of quirky changes in genes and how those

6
 In t ro d u c t i o n

changes fare in a particular environment depending on tempera-

ture, light abundance, and the availability of essential insect or
bird pollinators. As the late biologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould
always emphasized, evolution is contingent—contingent on a par-
ticular gene change in a particular environment.
Absent from the text are the names of the dozens of scientists
who did the experiments and developed the stories. They are left
out for several reasons. Often, there is a long history of discovery
and development leading to knowledge of any particular process
or gene. It’s not always simple to sort out just who should be men-
tioned in connection with particular findings. Several different sci-
entists may make discoveries, sometimes over decades, that only
come together into a coherent story years later. The story of when
and how a flower is made is complicated enough without adding
the complexity of the history of discovery. For those who are inter-
ested, the list of suggested further reading at the end of the book
can be used to find out more about the many scientists who have
contributed to the story.
Our understanding of how and when plants flower is far from
complete. There are many aspects that still need to be explored
and explained. And some of what is described here, while based
on current science, will surely turn out to be at best misleading
and, at worst, wrong. That’s the nature of science. New experi-
ments and concepts aim to bring us closer and closer to the way
things really work.
My hope is that after reading this book, whether you see long-
stemmed red roses in a street kiosk, or yellow tulips in spring
gardens, or wild purple asters covering a mountainside in late
summer, you will remember that they are the result of genes
working and evolving over the long history of life on Earth.

7
 PA RT I

What Plants Are and What

They Can Do
 W h at Pl a n t s A r e a nd
 W h at T he y C a n D o

Mary Mary quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.
English Nursery Rhyme

T hey may be stuck in one place, but plants can do many things.
We will look at some of them in this section. Along the way, it
introduces some of the words and concepts needed to tell the stories
that follow.
Chapter 1 is about names: the names of plants, of flower parts, and
of genes.
Vocabulary is the bugaboo of many efforts to write about science,
and genetics in particular, for the wider readership. Nobody seems
very bothered by encountering complex names from an unfamiliar
language when it comes to a novel. New words in books about science
seem to present many more difficulties than names in War and Peace.
Technical jargon turns away a lot of people. Years ago, a colleague of
mine discovered that students in an introductory college biology class
had to learn more new words than those in a first year French course!
No wonder so many students are put off biology. Newly discovered
things or processes require new names—like the verb “to google.”
Without them, we would be ­tongue-tied.
Readers will encounter a number of unfamiliar terms in this book,
but I have made a real effort to keep them to a minimum. Still, all the
plants and plant parts, as well as the genes, and molecules that shape
them need to be called something, and many of the names used in this
book were coined in the past few decades. Plant names were a chal-
lenge even in the past. These days, the same gene is given different names
if it’s discovered in more than one laboratory or more than one organ-
ism. This is frustrating for scientists reading research papers. Scientific

11
 W h at Pl a n t s A r e a nd W h at T he y C a n D o

societies try to ameliorate the problem by establishing committees

where decisions on ­uniform names are fought out, but the problem
has not gotten much easier over the centuries.
Chapter 2 is about the similarities and differences between plants
and animals. The differences are obvious to everyone, while the simi-
larities may be a surprise. Our kinship with plants goes deep. At that
very basic level, we are cousins: distant cousins, but still cousins. How
distant? No one knows for sure but the link, what is called our “last
common ancestor,” could have lived as far back as a billion years ago,
when the ancestors of land plants appeared in the sea.
Plants know a lot about their environments. They may not have our
sense organs, but they respond to the length of the day, to the direc-
tion of sunlight, to temperature and the pull of gravity, even to touch
in some cases. They also sense their age, their level of maturity.
Chapter 3 summarizes how plants know some of these things even
without the senses that inform animals. As we shall see later, all these
aspects matter for flowering.

12
 Chapter 1

NA MES

T heophrastus was the first person known to try to bring some

order into the naming of plants. Consequently, he is some-
times called the “father of botany.” Living around 300 bc, he was
lucky enough to become a student of Aristotle. A monument to
Theophrastus stands in his birthplace, the small town of Eressos
on the Greek island of Lesvos. Eressos must have been a special
place; some three centuries before Theophrastus, the great poet
Sappho was born there. Theophrastus’ groupings were, by mod-
ern standards, not very useful, but they were a start: trees, shrubs,
herbs, cereals, and the presence or absence of thorns. For whatever
reason, though, he had little to say about flowers.
Eighteen centuries later, in Europe, herbalists and botanists
began to invent and promote standard names to avoid the confu-
sion caused by the different names used in different places for the
same plant. They were forced to do this because, after Columbus’s
voyage to America in 1492 and the dawn of the so-called Age of
Exploration, many new plants were being imported from the west-
ern hemisphere. Botanical gardens were established at this time to
collect common and uncommon plants.
The naming problem was finally resolved in the eighteenth
­century by Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist. Linnaeus adopted some
 W h at Pl a n t s A r e a nd W h at T he y C a n D o

earlier ideas, including the use of Latin, then the language of most
scholars and physicians, and corresponded with scientists around
the world as he developed his naming system. Each plant (and ani-
mal) would be known by two names. The first described the gen-
eral group to which the plant belonged, the genus (plural, genera).
The second name designated the particular plant, the species.
Local, common names would still be used, but professional gar-
deners and scientists were able to communicate across geographic
boundaries without confusion. And the Linnaean system is used
to this day. Both names are written in italics, and the species name,
by convention, begins with a lower case letter.
The lungwort that is just showing its spotted leaves in my gar-
den as I write this in mid-March is called Pulmonaria officinalis. The
common name, lungwort, is not very pretty, but the plant, with its
early pink-purple blooms, is a favorite of mine. The dandelions
that will soon show themselves are Tavaxacum officinale. The two
plants have similar species names, but belong to different genera,
and are unrelated.
This book will use common American–English names for flow-
ers and the plants that produce them. Those common names can
still be confusing. Zea mays is the standard name for what is called
corn in the United States and maize in the United Kingdom, where
the word corn is used to describe the chief cereal crop of a region,
whatever it may be. Oats are called corn in Scotland, while wheat
is called corn in England.
Many common flower names used in this book will be familiar
to gardeners and other flower lovers. Among these are roses,
petunias, and snapdragons. Much of what we know about flower
color, for example, comes from studying petunias and snapdrag-
ons. One plant name that is not very familiar to most people but

14
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 The fur business of Canada has its beginning
when the company trader strikes a bargain with the
Eskimo for his season’s catch of the white fox of the
arctic and other skins.
 The Hudson’s Bay Company has more than two
hundred trading posts where Indians, Eskimos, and
white trappers exchange furs for goods. Eighteen of
the stations lie near or north of the Arctic Circle.
 Most of the fine fox skins now marketed in
Canada come from animals raised in captivity on fur
farms. Occasionally a cat may act as a substitute
mother for a litter of fox kittens.
Winnipeg has long been an important city in the Canadian fur
trade, and here the world’s greatest fur organization has its
headquarters. I refer, of course, to the Hudson’s Bay Company,
which for more than two hundred and fifty years has been bartering
goods for the furs of British North America. It was founded when the
British had scarcely a foothold in Canada, and its operations won for
them their dominion over the northwestern part of our continent. In
the beginning it was but one of many trading enterprises of the New
World. To-day it has adapted itself to the tremendous changes in our
civilization and it is bigger, stronger, and richer than ever.
Massachusetts Colony was not fifty years old when the
Nonsuch, loaded to the waterline with the first cargo of furs, sailed
for England from Hudson Bay. The success of the voyage led the
dukes and lords who backed the venture to ask King Charles II for a
charter. This was granted in 1670, and thus came into existence, so
far as the word of a king could make it so, “The Governor and
Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay,”
exclusive lords and proprietors of a vast and but vaguely known
region extending from Hudson Bay westward, with sole rights to fish,
hunt, and trade therein.
It remained for the Company to make good the privileges
conferred by the charter and maintain the profits, which at that period
sometimes amounted to one hundred per cent. a year. For nearly a
century the company’s ships and forts did battle with the armed
forces of the French. For another long period its factors and traders
had to meet the attacks of rival companies. At times the company
was nearly wiped out by the heavy losses it sustained. For almost
two centuries it furnished the only government of the Canadian
Northwest, and without the use of a standing army it administered a
vast region, out of which provinces and territories have since been
carved.
The “Company of Adventurers” has now become a fifteen million
dollar corporation, paying regularly five per cent. on ten million
dollars’ worth of preferred stock. A fleet of river, lake, and ocean
steamers has succeeded the Nonsuch. The early trading posts,
stocked with crude tools, weapons, and ornaments for the Indians,
have been supplemented by a chain of eleven department stores,
extending from Winnipeg to Vancouver, and at the same time the
number of trading posts exchanging goods for furs is greater than
ever. There are about two hundred of these posts, eighteen of which
are near or north of the arctic circle. The Company no longer actually
governs any territory, and it is selling to settlers the remainder of the
seven million acres in the fertile belt it has received from the
Dominion since the surrender of its ancient rights in the Northwest.
The story of the Hudson’s Bay Company is a large part of the
history of Canada. Many books have been written about it, and
countless romances built upon the lives of its men stationed in the
wilds. Here at Winnipeg the company has an historical exhibit where
one may visualize the life of the trappers and the traders, and gain
an idea of the adventures that are still commonplaces in their day’s
work. The company museum contains specimen skins of every kind
of Canadian fur-bearing animal. The life of the Indians and the
Eskimos is reproduced through the exhibits of their tools, boats,
weapons, and housekeeping equipment.
The success of the Hudson’s Bay Company has rested upon its
relations with the Indians. The organization is proud of the fact that it
has never engaged in wars with the tribes. The business has always
been on a voluntary basis, and the Indians have to come to the
Company posts of their own free will. At first the traders’ stocks were
limited, but through centuries of contact with civilization the wants of
the red man have increased and become more varied. They now
include nearly everything that a white man would wish if he were
living in the woods.
The first skins brought in from Hudson Bay were practically all
beavers. This led to the exchange being based on the value of a
single beaver skin, or “made beaver.” Sticks, quills, or brass tokens
were used, each designating a “made beaver,” or a fraction thereof.
The prices of a pound of powder, a gun, or a quart of glass beads
were reckoned in “made beaver.”
Early in its history the Company decided that Scotchmen made
the best traders and were most successful in dealing with the
Indians. Young Scotchmen were usually apprenticed as clerks on
five-year contracts, and if successful they might hope to become
traders, chief traders, factors, and chief factors. Men in these grades
were considered officers of the company and received commissions.
Mechanics and men engaged in the transport service were known as
“servants” of the company, and the distinction between “servants,”
clerks, and officers was almost as marked as in the various military
ranks of an army. To-day, Canada is divided into eleven districts,
each of which is in charge of a manager, and the old titles are no
longer used.
A trader had to be a diplomat to preserve friendly relations with
the Indians, an administrator to manage the Company’s valuable
properties in his charge, a shrewd bargainer to dispose of his stock
on good terms, and at times soldier and explorer besides. The
Company’s charter authorized it to apply the laws of England in the
territories under its jurisdiction, and its agents frequently had to
administer justice with a stern hand. It early became the inflexible
policy to seek out a horse thief, incendiary, or murderer among the
Indians and impose punishment, and it was the trader who had to
catch his man and sometimes to execute him.
It was the activities of its rivals, and especially of the Northwest
Company, that resulted in the establishment of the inland stations of
the Hudson’s Bay Company. As long as it had a monopoly, the
Company was content to set up posts at points convenient for itself,
and let the Indians do all the travelling, sometimes making them go
as much as one thousand miles to dispose of their furs. The
opposition, however, carried goods to the Indians, and thus
penetrated to the far Northwest and the Mackenzie River country.
This competition compelled the older organization to extend its posts
all over Canada, and finally, in 1821, led to its absorption of the
Northwest Company. To-day the chief competitor of the Hudson’s
Bay Company is the French firm of Revillon Frères.
The merger with the Northwest Company was preceded by
years of violent struggle. The younger concern was the more
aggressive. It tried to keep the Indians from selling furs to the
Hudson’s Bay traders. Its men destroyed the traps and fish nets, and
stole the weapons, ammunition, and furs of their rivals. Neither was
above almost any method of tricking the other if thereby furs might
be gained. Once some Hudson’s Bay men discovered the tracks of
Indians returning from a hunt. They at once gave a great ball, inviting
the men of the near by post of the rival company. While they plied
their guests with all forms of entertainment, a small party packed four
sledges with trade goods and stole off to the Indian camp. The next
day the Northwest men heard of the arrival of the Indians and went
to them to barter for furs, only to find that all had been sold to the
Hudson’s Bay traders. At another time two rival groups of traders
met en route to an Indian camp and decided to make a night of it.
But the Northwest men kept sober, and, when the Hudson’s Bay
men were full of liquor, tied them to their sleds and started their dog
teams back on the trail over which they had come. The Northwest
traders then went on to the Indians and secured all the furs.
 The Hudson’s Bay Company sends all of its raw skins to London,
where they are graded and prepared for the auction sales attended
by fur buyers from all over the world. It does not sell any in Canada.
Nevertheless, the Dominion is an important fur-making centre.
During a recent visit to Quebec, I spent a morning with the manager
of a firm which handles millions of dollars’ worth of furs every year. It
has its own workshops where the skins are cured and the furs
dressed and made into garments. The name of this firm is Holt,
Renfrew and Company. Let us go back to Quebec and pay it a visit.
Imagine a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of furs under one
roof! Picture to your minds raw skins in bales, just as they were
unloaded from an Indian canoe, and then look again and see wraps
and coats made from them that would each bring five thousand
dollars when sold on Fifth Avenue. If your imagination is vivid
enough you may see the American beauties who will wear them and
know how the furs will add to the sparkle of their eyes and at the
same time lighten the purses of their sweethearts and husbands.
We shall first go to the cold storage rooms. Here are piles of
sealskins from our Pribilof Islands. Put one of these furs against your
cheek. It feels like velvet. In these rooms are beavers from Labrador,
sables from Russia, and squirrels from Siberia. There are scores of
fox skins—blue, silver, black, and white. Some of them come from
the cold arctic regions and others from fox farms not twenty minutes
distant by motor. Take a look at this cloak of silvery gray fur. A year
ago the skins from which it was made were on the backs of hair
seals swimming in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.
As we go through the factory, some of the secrets of fur making
are whispered to us. For example, this bale contains fifteen hundred
skins of the muskrat. The animals which produced them will change
their names after a trip to the dyers. They will go into the vats and
when they come out they will be Hudson Bay seals, and eventually
will find their way into a black coat with a wonderful sheen. Years
ago the muskrat skin was despised. Now it is made into coats that,
under the trade name of Hudson seal, bring nearly as much as those
of real seal.
 Here are two Russian sables, little fellows of beautiful fur, that
together will form a single neck piece. The undressed skins are
worth seven hundred dollars the pair. As we look, the manager
shows us two native sables that seem to be quite as fine. He tells us
they can be had for eighty-five dollars each, or less than a quarter of
the price of the Russian.
The most valuable fur in the world to-day is the sea otter, of
which this firm gets only three or four skins in a year. But, in contrast,
over there is a whole heap of Labrador otters, beautiful furs, which
will wear almost for ever and will look almost as well as the sea otter
itself. But you can have your choice of these at forty dollars apiece.
They are cheap chiefly because the Labrador skin is not in fashion
with women. Fashion in furs is constantly changing. Not many years
ago a black fox skin often brought as much as fifteen hundred
dollars. To-day, so many are coming from the fur farms that the price
has fallen to one hundred and fifty dollars. Scarcity is one of the chief
considerations in determining the value of furs, and fashion always
counts more than utility. The rich, like the kings of old, demand
something that the poor cannot have, and lose their interest in the
genuine furs when their imitations have become common and cheap.
The dyer and his art have greatly changed the fur trade. It is he
who enables the salesgirl to wear furs that look like those of her
customers. For example, here is a coat made of the best beaver. Its
price is four hundred dollars, and beside it is another made of dyed
rabbit fur, marked one hundred and fifty dollars. It is hard for a novice
to tell which is the better. All sorts of new names have been devised
by the furriers to popularize dyed skins of humble animals, from
house cats to skunks, in order to increase the supply of good-looking
and durable furs. Reliable dealers will tell you just what their
garments are made of, but the unscrupulous pass off the imitations
as the genuine article.
The business of dyeing furs was developed first in Germany,
when that country led the world in making dyes. Now that New York
is competing with London as a great fur market many of the best
German dyers are at work there. From the standpoint of the
consumer, the chief objection to dyed fur is that the natural never
fades, while the dyed one is almost certain to change its hue after a
time.
Now let us go into the rooms where the furs are made up. It is
like a tailor shop. Here is a designer, evolving new patterns out of big
sheets of paper. There are the cutters, making trimmings, stoles,
neck pieces, and coats. Each must be a colour expert, for a large
part of the secret of fashioning a beautiful fur garment is in the skillful
matching of the varying shades to give pleasing effects. Were the
skins for a coat sewn together just as they come from the bale, the
garment resulting would be a weird-looking patchwork. Even before
the skins are selected, they must be graded for the colours and
shadings which go far to determine their value. There are no rules
for this work; it takes a natural aptitude and long experience. In the
London warehouse of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the men of a
single family have superintended the grading of all the millions of
skins handled there for more than one hundred years.
Turn over this unfinished beaver coat lying on the bench and
look at the wrong side. See how small are the pieces of which it is
made and how irregular are their shapes. It is a mass of little
patches, yet the outer, or right side, looks as though it were made of
large skins, all of about the same size and shape. A coat of muskrat,
transformed by dyeing into Hudson seal, may require seventy-five
skins; a moleskin coat may contain six hundred. But in making up
either garment each skin must be cut into a number of pieces and
fitted to others in order to get the blending of light and dark shades
which means beauty and quality.
 The Eskimo woman and her children wear as
every-day necessities furs which if made into more
fashionable garments would bring large sums. Usually
the whole family goes on the annual trip to the trading
post.
 As Saskatchewan was not made a province until
1904, Regina is one of the youngest capital cities in
Canada. It was for many years the headquarters of
the Mounted Police for all the Northwest.
 CHAPTER XXIII
SASKATCHEWAN

We have left Winnipeg and are now travelling across the great
Canadian prairie, which stretches westward to the Rockies for a
distance of eight hundred miles. This land, much of which in summer
is in vast fields of golden grain, is now bare and brown, extending on
and on in rolling treeless plains as far as our eyes can reach. Most of
it is cut up into sections a mile square, divided by highway spaces
one hundred feet wide. However, an automobile or wagon can go
almost anywhere on the prairie, and everyone makes his own road.
Sixty miles west of Winnipeg we pass Portage la Prairie, near
where John Sanderson, the man who filed the first homestead on the
prairies, is still living. This part of the Dominion was then inhabited by
Indians, and its only roads were the buffalo trails made by the great
herds that roamed the country. To-day it is dotted with the
comfortable homes of prosperous farmers, and the transcontinental
railways have brought it within a few days’ travel of the Atlantic and
the Pacific seaboards.
A hundred and fifty miles farther west we cross the boundary into
Saskatchewan, the greatest wheat province of the Dominion. It has
an area larger than that of any European country except Russia, and
is as large as France, Belgium, and Holland combined. From the
United States boundary, rolling grain lands extend northward through
more than one third of its area. The remainder is mostly forest,
thinning out toward Reindeer Lake and Lake Athabaska at the north,
and inhabited chiefly by deer, elk, moose, and black bear. There are
saw-mills at work throughout the central part of the province, and the
annual lumber cut is worth in the neighbourhood of two million
dollars.
 Except at the southwest, Saskatchewan is well watered. The
Saskatchewan River, which has many branches, drains the southern
and central sections. This stream in the early days was a canoe
route to the Rockies. For a long time afterward, when the only
railway was the Canadian Pacific line in the southern part of the
province, the river was the highway of commerce for the north. It was
used largely by settlers who floated their belongings down it to the
homesteads they had taken up on its banks. Now the steamboats
that plied there have almost entirely disappeared. The northern part
of the province is made up of lakes and rivers so numerous that
some of them have not yet been named. The southwest is a strip of
semi-arid land that has been brought under cultivation by irrigation
and now raises large crops of alfalfa.
A small part of southwestern Saskatchewan, near the Alberta
boundary, is adapted for cattle and sheep raising. The Chinook
winds from the Pacific keep the winters mild and the snowfall light,
so that live stock may graze in the open all the year round.
Elsewhere the winters are extremely cold. The ground is frozen dry
and hard, the lakes and streams are covered with ice, and the
average elevation of about fifteen hundred feet above sea level
makes the air dry and crisp. The people do not seem to mind the
cold. I have seen children playing out-of-doors when it was twenty-
five degrees below zero. The summers are hot, and the long days of
sunshine are just right for wheat growing.
After travelling fourteen or fifteen hours from Winnipeg, we are in
Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, on the main line of the
Canadian Pacific, about midway between Winnipeg and the Rockies.
I visited it first in 1905, when the province was less than a year old.
Until that time all the land between Manitoba and British Columbia,
from the United States to the Arctic Ocean, belonged to the
Northwest Territories. It had minor subdivisions, but the country as a
whole was governed by territorial officials with headquarters at
Regina. As the flood of immigrants began to spread over the West,
the people of the wheat belt decided that they wanted more than a
territorial government and so brought the matter before the Canadian
parliament. As a result the great inland provinces of Saskatchewan
and Alberta were formed. They are the only provinces in the
Dominion that do not border on the sea.
Regina was then a town of ragged houses, ungainly buildings,
and wide streets with board sidewalks reaching far out into the
country. One of the streets was two miles long, extending across the
prairie to the mounted police barracks and the government house.
Regina was the headquarters of the Northwest Mounted Police until
that organization was amalgamated with the dominion force as the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the city is still a training camp
for recruits. Saskatchewan was not then old enough to have a state
house, and the government offices were in rooms on the second
floors of various buildings. Most of the provincial business was done
in a little brick structure above the Bank of Commerce.
The hotels of the town were then packed to overflowing, even in
winter, and in the spring and summer it was not uncommon to find
the halls filled with cots. I had to sleep in a room with two beds, and
with a companion who snored so that he shook the door open night
after night. It was of no use to complain, as the landlord could tell
one to go elsewhere, knowing very well that there was no elsewhere
but outdoors.
To-day Regina is ten times as large as it was twenty years ago. It
is a modern city with up-to-date hotels, ten banks, handsome
parliament buildings, and twelve railway lines radiating in every
direction. It is the largest manufacturing centre between Winnipeg
and Calgary, and an important distributing point for farm implements
and supplies.
The dome of the capitol building, which was completed in 1911,
can now be seen from miles away on the prairie. This is an imposing
structure five hundred and forty-two feet long, situated in the midst of
a beautiful park on the banks of an artificial lake made by draining
Wascana Creek. The city has many other parks, and the residence
streets are lined with young trees, planted within the last twenty
years. Forty miles to the east is a government farm at Indian Head,
where experiments are made in growing and testing trees suited to
the prairies. Fifty million seedlings have been distributed in one year
among the farms and towns. Out in the country the trees are planted
as windbreaks and to provide the farmers with fuel. They have
greatly changed the aspect of the prairies within the last two
decades.
 The grain lands of western Canada begin in
Manitoba in the fertile Red River valley, which is world
famous for the fine quality of its wheat. From here to
the Rockies is a prairie sea, with farmsteads for
islands.
 American windmills tower over Saskatchewan
prairie lands that were largely settled by American
farmers. The province is still so thinly populated that it
has only five people to every ten square miles.
 The wheat harvest, like time and tide, waits for no
man and when the crop is ready it must be promptly
cut. The grain is usually threshed in the fields and
sent at once to the nearest elevator.
While in Regina I have had a talk with the governor-general of
Saskatchewan in his big two-story mansion that twenty years ago
seemed to be situated in the middle of the prairie. When I motored
out to visit His Excellency, although I was wrapped in buffalo robes
and wore a coon-skin coat and coon-skin cap, I was almost frozen,
and when I entered the mansion it was like jumping from winter into
the lap of summer. At one end of the house is a conservatory, where
the flowers bloom all the time, although Jack Frost has bitten off all
other vegetation with the “forty-degrees-below-zero teeth” he uses in
this latitude.
From Regina, the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway runs
west to Calgary. Were we to travel by that route, we should pass
through Moose Jaw and Swift Current, two important commercial
centres for the wheat lands. The story is told that Lord Dunsmore, a
pioneer settler, once mended the wheel of his prairie cart with the
jaw bone of a moose on the site of the former city, and thus gave the
place its name. Moose Jaw is a live stock as well as a wheat
shipping point. It has the largest stock yards west of Winnipeg. An
extensive dairying industry has grown up in that region.
North of Regina are Prince Albert and Battleford, noted for their
fur trade and lumber mills, and also Saskatoon, the second largest
city of the province, which we shall visit on our way to Edmonton. At
Saskatoon is the University of Saskatchewan, which was patterned
largely after the University of Chicago. It has the right to a Rhodes
scholarship; and its departments include all the arts and sciences.
As sixty per cent. of the people are dependent upon agriculture,
farm courses receive much attention. A thousand-acre experimental
farm is owned by the university and the engineering courses include
the designing and operation of farm machinery. Even the elementary
schools are interested in agriculture, a campaign having been
carried on recently to eradicate gophers, which destroy the wheat.
The children killed two million of these little animals in one year,
thereby saving, it is estimated, a million bushels of grain. A
department of ceramics has been organized at the university to
experiment with the extensive clay deposits of the province, the
various grades of which are suited for building brick, tile, pottery, and
china. Saskatchewan’s only other mineral of any importance is lignite
coal, although natural gas has been discovered at Swift Current.
 CHAPTER XXIV
THE WORLD’S LARGEST WHEATFIELD

For the past two weeks I have been travelling through lands that
produce ninety per cent. of Canada’s most valuable asset—wheat.
The Dominion is the second greatest wheat country in the world,
ranking next to the United States. It is the granary of the British
Empire, raising annually twice as much wheat as Australia and fifty
million bushels more than India. The wheat crop is increasing and
Canada may some day lead the world in its production. These
prairies contain what is probably the most extensive unbroken area
of grain land on earth. In fact, so much wheat is planted in some
regions that it forms an almost continuous field reaching for
hundreds of miles. The soil is a rich black loam that produces easily
twenty bushels to an acre, and often forty and fifty.
The Canadian wheat belt extends from the Red River valley of
Manitoba to the foothills of the Rockies, and from Minnesota and
North Dakota northward for a distance greater than from
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. New wheat lands are constantly being
opened, and large crops are now grown in the Peace River country,
three hundred miles north of Edmonton.
A man who is an authority on wheat raising tells me that the
possible acreage in the Canadian West is enormous. Says he:
“We have something like three hundred and twenty thousand
square miles of wheat lands. Divide this in two, setting half aside for
poor soil and mixed farming, and there is left more than one
hundred-thousand square miles. In round numbers, it is one hundred
million acres, and the probability is that it can raise an average of
twenty-five bushels to the acre. This gives us a possible crop of