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THESE ARE SO FAR UNPUBLISHED. PLEASE CONTACT ME IF ANYONE WANTS TO PUBLISH THEM. FOR MORE UNPUBLISHED ARTICLES, CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO PAGE ONE. CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO PAGE TWO. Monday, June 06, 2005; originally WRITTEN CIRCA 1981, based on experiences circa 1976-84. Seed Collecting For The Amateur Gerald Krulik There is a rapidly increasing interest in growing wild flowers. This is due to several factors. One is a greater appreciation of, and concern for, the living landscape. People are interested in ecology and are more willing to leave someland in a natural state. The fun of growing colorful yet low maintenance plants is a real factor too. Most wild plants need absolutely no care once established, and they will even reseed themselves. This has made many converts among all those gardeners who spend hours digging, planting, weeding, watering, and fertilizing each year. At one time this interest would have meant wholesale assault upon the countryside. Whole regions would have been denuded of their choicest plants, of which most would have quickly died. Fortunately today people are more ecology conscious. Many wild plants are now available as nursery-grown specimens or as seeds, eliminating the need to destroy the countryside. Seeds are an excellent, low cost alternative to buying adult plants. They are even fun if you can collect them yourself. But why is seed collecting allowable when plant collecting is not? The answer is that all plants produce quantities of seed in excess of actual needs for population recruitment.; A single New England Aster, for example, may have 25 or more seeds per flower head, and up to 200 or more flowers per plant. This givews more than 5000 seeds from a single plant. In addition, this plant is a perennial, living and flowering for many years as it increases in size from its root stock. Yet, in order to maintain the total number of plants, only ONE seed during its whole lifetime needs to grow into another plant. All the rest are surplus. The change of a seed collector doing any great damage to a plant population is small for most plants as long as the adults are not destroyed. Even with annual plants, reasonable restraint will allow many seeds to remain for next year’s plants. Anyone can collect wild seeds. Iff you just want to collect some seeds to brighten a wild corner of your yard, a wooded, or swampy area, or a fallow field, no names are needed. Many people are happy to just have pretty plants. Other people want to know what they have to satisfy their curiosity or perhaps to trade with other people. This can be a real problem. The first step in identifying plants is to get a good filed guide. My favorite for Midwest/east coast plants is Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. It ahs an ingenious key which turns out to be valuable in seed identification. Most guides divide plants up by flower color, or by botanical family. Many seeds can be identified by these guids because the flowering season is realtiveldy long and/or the seeds mature quickly. When the flower can still be found, identification is simple. The Newcomb guide separates plants by growth type (shrub, vine, herb), by leaf type and placement, and by the number of parts in a flower. No botanical knowledge is necessary. In most cases you can at least narrow down the field enough so that you just have to compare a few dozen detailed drawings with your pnat. Ther are exceptions though. In some cases you do need the flower to decide—such as with some mints and orchids (NOT recommended for collecting)—because the color or flower shape is the key. In other cases nothing is left but the fruit on a naked stalk, as with some trilliums. What I do in these cases is to make several trips to one area and try to identify the difficult plants when in flower. Then I note places where these flowers were numerous and come back at intervals until the seeds are ripe. Where do you look? The answer is –everywhere! Desirable plants can be found in fields, swamps, woods, treelawns, farmyards, waste places, orchards, around ponds and streams, in deserts and on mountains. Before you collect, consider where you want to plant the seeds. The best results are obtained when the growing area is similar to the collecting area. Don’t collect woodland plants and expect them to brighten your fields, or vice versa. Don’t neglect obvious public places either, just because they are well used. I recently found a small stand of a very rare Gentian. It grew on the edge of a fishing hole, a wide spot in the drainage ditch behind a local school, and less than four feed from a freshly cleared lawn! The question of when to look is more difficult. If you just want spring wildflowers, mark the spots and come back until all the seeds are ripe. Many people want plant for the whole season though, not just spring plants. It is unsettling to realize that if you pick a patch of land, and completely inventory each pant, you still do not know how many kinds grow there! This phenomenon is called temporal procession. It means that stored under any area of land is a community of seeds, roots, bulbs, and tubers. Most are dormant or inconspicuous much of the year. Some grow only during one or two seasons. More rarely, like wild mustard, they will grow in two separate seasons, spring and fall. Others maybe there the whole year but are too inconspicuous to notice. They may look like grass clumps, like Ohio Goldenrod. Or they may be impossible to identify, like many asters and gentians, without a flower. Anyone who is more than casually interested in seed collecting should pick out a few favoite areas. Visit them regularly, at least once a month. Each time you look you will find new plants in flower and in fruit. But, do you want everything? Obviously not. Most people do not want the grasses, ragweeds, clovers, dandelions. Pick only what you need, and use restraint. Don’t pick every seedhead of a stand of a rare plant. Many plants should be left strictly alone—orchids for example, and parasitic plants like dodder and mistletoe. Other difficult or rare plants might be tried on a very limited scale if your intended growing area looks identical to the collecting area—bogbean, or gentians. Semi-parasitic plants such as a number of the Scrofularidae family might be fruitful, as well as exotics like the large yellow bell flower that grows semiparasitically on oak roots. You will soon find that no two fields are alike in the number of species they hold. The majority of kinds will be the same but usually the most desirable seem to be the rarer ones. Botanists will sometimes identify and number all the plants in a given area. The numbers of species in various sized plots are then graphed as number of species vs area checked, to give the species/area curve. One way is to plot the number of kinds versus the total area for areas of a square yard to a square mile. If a small area is checked there will be only a few kinds of plants. As the areas expand more kinds will appear. This is usually found to be a logarithmic relationship, not an arithmetic one. If there are 25 kinds of plants in an acre, it would take 10 acres, not 2, to usually find 50 kinds. This means that you will find more plants if you look in more places, but you eventually reach the point of diminishing returns. Botanists make another type of plot with similar information. They take the same size plots of land, for example, 10 square yards, and count all of the plants on it. They then plot the number of plants of each species versus its percentage of the total number of plants. A typical result is that 80 or 90% of the total plants will be represented by only 20% of number of species. This shows that most kinds of plants are relatively rare. An area may have 1000 plants of 25 kinds, but 900 may be of only 5 kinds, while the other 20 species only have 100 individuals in total. However, many plants do grow in stands or groups. Few plants always grow alone, so if you find a good plant, look around. Chances are that you have found a favored plot where the normally rare plants outnumber the common ones. Fortunately most desirable plants for home planting have conspicuous flowers. They can easily be spotted even at very low population densities. The biggest problem, as mentioned before, is finding and identifying these scarce plants when the flowers are gone and the seeds are ripe. One other problem is that some plants flower abundantly yet set no or very little seed. This can be extremely frustrating. Many Trilliums do this, so that when you return to the extensive flower patch to collect seeds youmay not even find the patch. This is one plant that rapidly dies down unless seed is set, and even then you may have only a leafless stalk with a naked ripe berry on the end. Mayapple is a very common plant that flowers well yet mainly reproduces by underground runners. Another such plant is the Wild Groundnut. It has beautiful large clusters of waxy purple-brown flowers but almost all reproduction seems to be by way of the edible underground tubers. WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR SEEDS Once you have the seeds you have to clean, dry, and store them. It is not recommended to just collect them and put them away. Most seed pods contain various insects, especially weevils living in the seeds. Other beetle larvae, moth and fly larvae, are also common. Seed pods usually have not dried completely so they cannot be put in a tightly sealed container or else they will mold. First make at least a rough separation of seeds from stems, leaves, pods, and so forth. Now arrange each kind a shallow layer and bake in a barely warm oven (110-120 F) for at least 2 and preferably 4 hours, or longer if not yet dry. This will kill most insect eggs, larvae, and adults without harming most seeds. The water content will be lowered enough to prevent mold or premature germination. Seed storage should be in labeled paper envelopes. I sprinkle mine with a small amount of insecticidal powder such as rotenone, or put in some moth balls. They are then stored in a dry cool place. Better yet is a tightly sealed container which has a generous amount of florists silica gel in the bottom. Seeds are alive: they burn their stored food and give off water vapor very slowly. Without the silica gel the seeds could eventually get moldy. PLANTING AND GROWTH Many people do n ot bother to clean, dry, or store their seeds. They merely collect them and scatter them around when they get home. This is an excellent method because the seeds will naturally germinate and grow when the proper season arrives. Another way is to plant them in spring in prepared or unprepared seeds beds. Be warned that you may have only a few seedlings the first year. Cultivated plants have been selected to germinate quickly and uniformly after planting. After all, man will protect them from insects, drought, or disease. Wild plants must fend for themselves. Only a percentage of their seeds will germinate at any time. The rest may lay in the soil for years, some coming up each year. There is another problem with spring planting. Many temperate zone seeds will not germinate without a period of cold, or alternate periods of cold and thaw while wet. Some people will put seeds in wet spaghnum and alternately freeze and thaw them dialy in their refrigerator. After a few weeks the seeds are planted normally. This is called stratifacation and is especially useful for shrub seeds and perennial seeds. Recently it has been discovered that some seeds from areas which are prone to fires, need smoke exposure to germinate well. Ethylene and a few other compounds have been shown to break the dormancy of these seeds; without smoke, few or no seeds commonly germinate. Here you would have to experiment, with keeping the seeds in a smokey area without cooking them. You should get many blooms the first year, especially if you have collected annuals. Some of the seeds you collect will probably be biennials, flowering the second year, or perennials, which may take a much longer time to start to flower, but which are relatively permanent once established. The majority will probably be perennials. They may flower the first year but most will increase in size, cluster, and flower more profusely each year. Many asters, goldenrods, and even some sunfloers will form large colorful clumps. The following lists are a general guide for collection, and is specific to the eastern half of the US. This is a representative list only, of some of the more common types. Desirable Types Difficult/Specialized Types Do Not Collect Asters Bogbean Orchids Goldenrods Blueberries Parasites Iris Gentians (dodder, beachdrops, mistletoe, etc) Milkweeds Lillies Milkworts Swamp Mallow Louseworts Sunflowers Shooting Stars False Foxgloves or Gerardias Bonesets Sundews Water Hemlock Coneflowers Pitcher Plants Poison Ivy or Oak Hawkweeds Trilliums Bellflowers Groundnut Lobellias Aristolochia Morning Glories Mints Written spring 1981, after a stint collecting native seeds to send to British correspondant in exchange for other seeds. |
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