﻿FLOWER HUNTER, Written By Debbie Darr Valdez, Illustrated by Shirley Beckes.

What different types of plants do you know about? 

CHAPTER ONE: Types of plants.

	Pete stared into the pine forests of the Georgia mountains.  The land didn't seem as beautiful now as it had earlier.  He picked up a stick and poked at the campfire.  Pete's father was hurt.  
He was lying on the ground with his broken leg wrapped in cloth.
	"Amos, you crazy mule" Pete yelled at the grazing animal.  
"If you had not run from that bear, Father wouldn't have fallen off"!
	There were few towns and no doctors in the Georgia mountains in 1765 .  
Pete and his father had set the broken bone in place, but healing would take a long time.
	Pete and his father had been hunting for plants. Pete's father was a botanist, or plant expert.  
The Cherokee called him "Flower Hunter".  
Pete wanted to be a flower hunter, too. 
 	"Son, I want you to look carefully at every flower", Pete's father had said on an earlier trip.
	"Some plants don't have flowers" Pete had answered.
	"You're right," his father had said.  
"That fir tree doesn't have flowers.  It's a conifer, or cone-bearing plant. It has hard brown cones".
	"Like pine cones," said Pete.
	"Yes.  Do you know what these cones have inside them" asked his father.
	Pete opened a cone.  "Seeds," he said.  "Father, do all plants have seeds?
	"Most plants do.  They are divided into two groups.  One is flowering plants.  The other is cone-bearing plants. Flowering plants have seeds inside fruits, and cone-bearing plants have seeds in cones".
	On the last hunting trip, Pete had discovered the two kinds of flowering plants.  One kind, monocots, have flowers with groups of three petals.  Dicots have flowers with groups of four or five petals.  It was fun looking at all those plants.
