Mary Broadrick, age l2, of Charlotte, N.C., for her question:

What makes flowers smell?

There is no end to the miracles that go on inside a living plant. Throughout the day its green foliage uses sunlight to make sugar from air and water. This simple sugar is the basic plant food. Other chemical miracles transform it into complex substances and use them to build growing buds and leaves, roots and shoots, flowers and fruit.

The list of complex chemicals that a plant creates with its basic sugar is very long. some of them may be sweet smelling oils. Most of these find their way to the flowers. The leaves and wood and all other plant tissues are built from boxy little cells. In the petal tissues there are pockets between some of the cells. The perfumed oils fill these miniature pockets and because they tend to evaporate, they carry away their sweet fragrance into the surrounding air.